On the same day the World Health Organization lifted its travel advisory against non-essential travel to Toronto, a Wisconsin man who returned from that city in mid-April became the first probable resident from the state to develop Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Dr. Mark Wegner, chief of the communicable disease epidemiology section at the Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services, said the man found to be sick with symptoms similar to those of SARS Wednesday was being monitored, along with another reported case of the disease in a young girl from Northeastern Wisconsin who also traveled to Toronto at the height of that city?s SARS alert.
SARS created mild panic across the world as it began to infect and kill citizens of Southeast Asia and spread throughout the world via travelers cooped up in airliner cabins and cruise ships. Vietnam has been removed from the list of countries where the disease was transmitted locally.
Doctors around the world have had a difficult time differentiating between patients suffering from the mysterious SARS disease and those simply suffering symptoms of less serious, more commonly treated ailments.
?They?re very broad indications in that the symptoms of SARS could apply to regularly communicated pneumonia or influenza,? Wegner said. ?The distinction between a suspected case and a probable case is the evidence of pneumonia on a chest X-ray.?
Suspected cases and probable cases are treated the same way as far as care and quarantine given to the patient.
?The situation of course is more serious in a place like China where a case will occur and doctors and officials will not have a clear idea of where they?re getting the symptoms from,? Wegner said.
The actual verification of a suspected or probable case of SARS can be a lengthy process because blood samples from when the patient first experiences fever must be compared to blood samples from when the person recovers from the illness, usually about three weeks later.
Wegner stressed that just because there are distinctive symptoms similar to SARS present in a patient, it does not mean that person was infected with the agent that causes the affliction. He also stressed that cases in the United States and Canada can still be tracked back to their sources.
Later that same day, a Madison biotech firm announced that it had developed a test for SARS using their genetic decoding technology.
EraGen Biosciences Incorporated developed the test using synthetic SARS viruses and now has sent it off to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases for verification of its viability.
Regina Reynolds, director of corporate communication for EraGen, said the company itself was working with the genetic coding for the coronavirus that causes SARS but not in an active form.
?We do not have the live virus to work with, so we have to send it to someone on the outside who can verify it,? Reynolds said.
EraGen had already worked with the Army Medical Research Institute on developing a product for anthrax, and has also sent its test to the World Health Organization and the Center for Disease Control in Canada and Atlanta.
EraGen became the first American group to develop a standard SARS test as a German company has also sent a test to the World Health Organization, but stressed being first was not a priority.
?Our team of scientists are so dedicated and so knowledgeable that they were able to produce a proof positive in a short amount of time,? Reynolds said.
The scientists worked with gene decoding technology they had previously used to work on HIV and hepatitis viruses.
Reynolds said the Madison community was a fertile one for biotech firms such as EraGen and that it had very good working relationships with faculty and scientists at the University of Wisconsin.
