Quarantine ends for 262 found Sars-free
Quarantine ended for 262 people yesterday after they were declared free of Sars.
The quarantined people had come into contact with Sars patients in Beijing and Anhui province during last month's outbreak of the virus and were placed under medical observation as a precaution.
There were no new reports of suspected or confirmed cases of Sars on the mainland yesterday, according to the Ministry of Health. Nine people have contracted Sars in the latest outbreak. Seven are still being treated in Beijing, while the other two were in Anhui. One of the Anhui patients died on April 19.
The ministry said all of the Sars patients were making a rapid recovery, except for one of the Beijing victims.
In Beijing, the quarantine order has been lifted for 159 people in the city's Jiangong Hospital and the People's Hospital of Peking University after two weeks medical observation.
Authorities said none of the quarantined people, who included medical workers and patients at the two hospitals where nurse Li Na worked, had developed Sars.
Ms Li, 20, was among the first confirmed Sars patients in Beijing last month and was discharged from Ditan Hospital on Wednesday.
The Jiangong and Peking University hospitals were closed on April 22 after it was confirmed that Ms Li had caught the disease from one of her patients, a researcher at the Beijing Institute of Virology.
Jin Dapeng , director of the Beijing Hygiene Department, said the 159 people quarantined had their temperatures taken daily and no signs of Sars were detected.
The two hospitals were disinfected and the patients' samples destroyed to avoid accidental contamination. Xinhua said the hospitals would be reopened soon.
Meanwhile, in Anhui, 103 of the 115 people put in quarantine after coming into contact with a Sars patient in that province last month were released from medical observation yesterday, Xinhua reported.
It said the remaining patients in Anhui were in stable condition and had not developed a fever in the past 13 days.
Cases of Sars in the latest outbreak have been limited to people who worked at the Institute of Virology and those who had close contact with them. The institute is known to have conducted experiments using a live Sars virus.
