World Health Organisation ‘closely monitoring’ China’s viral pneumonia outbreak
- UN body says it is in close contact with the authorities over mysterious strain of illness in Wuhan city
- Chinese authorities say number of cases has reached 44 as efforts to identify cause of outbreak continues
The World Health Organisation said on Saturday that it had activated its disease incident management system and was closely monitoring the outbreak of an unidentified strain of viral pneumonia in central China.
The announcement came after the number of cases reported by Chinese authorities in Wuhan, a city with a population of 11 million, had jumped to 44 from 27 in the space of three days.
“We’re closely monitoring the situation in Wuhan and are in active communication with our counterparts in China,” the WHO’s Western Pacific regional office said in a statement.
It said the authorities in Beijing had been in contact and its incident management system had been activated at the national and regional levels and in its headquarters in Geneva.
The WHO said that it “can launch a broader response if needed”and continued:“Govt actions to control the incident have been instituted and investigations into the cause are ongoing.”
A spokeswoman for the WHO said incident management teams had been activated at all three levels on Thursday, adding that similar measures were in place for the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the global measles outbreak.
The WHO also said that China has an “extensive capacity” to respond to the incident and is taking a number of measures, including investigating the cause, isolating patients, tracing close contacts and closing the seafood market at the centre of the outbreak.
On Friday, Wuhan municipal health commission said 44 people had been admitted to hospital with the unidentified virus, up from the 27 reported on Tuesday.
Eleven of those were in a serious condition, while a further 121 people who had been in close contact with the infected patients had been placed under medical observation. No deaths have been reported.
The commission added that there was no proof of human-to-human transmission, nor had any medical staff contracted the illness.
The outbreak has triggered concern because of the similarities with the epidemics of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and bird flu which killed hundreds of people in mainland China and Hong Kong between 2002 and 2004.
