Third suspected SARS case in China
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Health workers remove a cage full of live rats at a wildlife market in Guangdong.
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Almost a year has passed since the first case of SARS, and China believes it is better prepared to deal with another outbreak of the virus.
Experts now believe the SARS virus is rooted in Chinese animal markets. CNN's Mike Chinoy reports (Contains graphic images).
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HONG KONG, China -- China has confirmed a 35-year-old male patient in the southern province of Guangdong as a suspected SARS case -- its third since the world was declared SARS free in July.
The man is in stable condition in a hospital in the provincial capital of Guangzhou, where two other SARS cases, one of them confirmed, have been treated, Xinhua reported on Monday.
There had been some confusion over the status of the man, with Chinese officials earlier preferring to say only that the patient was in isolation and not categorized as a "suspected" case.
The World Health Organization says it expects many patients to present with SARS- like symptoms as winter illnesses show similar traits to the SARS virus, such as fever and coughs.
Last Monday, China confirmed its first SARS case since a world outbreak was declared over in July.
The man was a 32-year-old television producer named Luo, who has since recovered and been discharged from hospital.
It is not clear how he got SARS as he told authorities he had no contact with wild animals.
Meanwhile investigators have searched a restaurant in Guangdong where a 20-year-old waitress worked, after she was listed as a suspected SARS case last week.
Extermination
Evidence of a possible link between SARS and animals from wildlife markets popular in the region has prompted Guangdong authorities into a mass culling.
Thousands of civets -- considered a local delicacy -- have been slaughtered after researchers named the animal as the possible source of the virus before it jumped to humans.
Guangdong is widely accepted as the place SARS first emerged to such devastating effect in November 2002. It went on to infect more than 8,000 people in nearly 30 countries, killing about 800 of them.
"Basically, most of the civet cats in Guangdong have been slaughtered," one official at the Guangzhou Anti-SARS Office told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Cleaners were also sweeping streets and targeting potential disease spreaders such as rats, cockroaches, flies and mosquitoes.
The Guangzhou-based newspaper Yangcheng Evening News said on its Web site Sunday that a three-day campaign on eliminating rats was drawing more than 10,000 people.
It said more than 10 tonnes of grain had been laced with poison and deployed in "millions of places" to kill rats.
"Exercise caution in dealing with rat carcasses," it said, quoting authorities.
Public health experts have said they think SARS can be contained as long as a good surveillance and isolation system is in place.
"We feel that this is a disease where we may see small numbers of cases," said Julie Hall, a World Health Organization expert in Beijing.
"We may even see very small numbers of clusters, but we should not see the large outbreaks that we saw before if the system is strong enough to be able to do that early detection."
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Associated Press contributed to this report.
