Paris, Aug 15: Rats unleashed Hong Kong's biggest outbreak of Sars rather than a faulty sewage system as an official inquiry has ascertained, according to an unusual hypothesis.

Stephen Ng, a Hong Kong-based epidemiologist with Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health in New York, says the official account simply cannot explain why so many people fell sick so quickly at Amoy Gardens earlier this year.
He suggests that rats, living in pipes and lightwells, were to blame, quickly spreading the disease among the Kowloon high-rise housing estate after one of the rodents was infected by a human.

A total of 321 people, living in 15 blocks, fell sick with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) from March 21 until mid-April.
The outbreak was scary for Sars fighters, who had previously thought that the virus was only transmissible in close proximity, through airborne droplets sneezed by someone with the disease.



An inquiry conducted by the government and supported by the World Health Organisation (WHO) pinned the initial source to a 33-year-old man with Sars who had spent two nights at a mid-level floor at his brother's home.



Droplets from his contaminated faeces then travelled through the interconnected sewage pipes into faulty bathroom drain pipes. Bathroom extractor fans then sucked the virus into apartments, according to this account.



But Ng, writing in tomorrow's issue of the Lancet, says this just does not stand up.


Bureau Report