Deadly virus won't spark Hong Kong Sars epidemic, scientists say

The coronavirus that has recently emerged in the Middle East and killed one person has been confirmed as a different bug from the one that caused the deadly Sars epidemic in 2003.

"It is a new coronavirus, but it is not the Sars virus," World Health Organisation director general Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun said yesterday.

Separately, doctors yesterday said five people at a Danish hospital are suffering from a typical influenza strain and not the new Sars-like illness as feared.

The five, three adults and two children, tested positive for Influenza B, , the Odense University Hospital said, and were recovering. They were to be released later in the day.

The new Sars-like virus, which causes a serious respiratory infection, took the life of a 60-year-old Saudi Arabian man earlier this year, and a 49-year-old Qatari man is in critical condition after he visited the Saudi kingdom. It sparked fears of a recurrence of the Sars epidemic - also caused by a coronavirus - that killed 774 worldwide including 299 in Hong Kong. But the likelihood was dismissed by the WHO and Hong Kong's Health Department.

Chan said the WHO had so far been unable to evaluate the disease fully, as it could gain only limited data from the two known cases. "The only relation between the cases is one patient was from Saudi Arabia, and the other had visited Saudi Arabia," she said.

Dr Thomas Tsang Ho-fai, controller of Hong Kong's Centre for Health Protection, warned the new virus could still cause a serious outbreak, even though gene sequencing had proved it was different from Sars.