High School Near Toronto Quarantined in SARS Scare

More than 1,600 students and teachers at a suburban high school north of here were quarantined Wednesday after an 11th-grader was hospitalized with SARS, and health officials predicted a significant increase in reported cases of the disease over the next few days.

Administrators at Father Michael McGivney Catholic Academy sprang into action to alert parents Tuesday night after the student, who attended classes for three days last week with symptoms of the illness, was hospitalized and listed in satisfactory condition with a high fever.

“We’re saying that this teenage person does have SARS and so this is deadly serious,” Dr. Murray McQuigge, public health consultant for York Regional Health Services, said in a public announcement.

A second 11th-grader was being assessed for signs of the illness, McQuigge said.

Students and staff at the school were being asked to remain in isolation in their homes until Tuesday, when the school will reopen. The student’s mother, a health-care worker at one of the local hospitals hardest hit by severe acute respiratory syndrome, also was hospitalized with the illness.

“Once we heard about it, we went into emergency mode,” said Chris Cable, communications manager for the York Catholic School District. “It’s been a whirlwind of activity, but I think we’ve been successful.”

Only 25 of the school’s 1,500 students showed up for classes Wednesday without having been notified of the closure, she said.

Plans called for public health officials to deliver face masks and thermometers to each student’s home and then check in daily by telephone to determine whether any additional students show signs of the disease.

“Because the student was there for three days, I think there’s certainly a likelihood that other people have been exposed. Do I expect to see cases out of that? I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised,” McQuigge said in an interview. “Teenage kids share a lot of things, right? And are in close contact with each other. That’s a setting where I think the chance of having some spread is there.”

A total of 5,424 people are under quarantine in the Toronto area, and health officials said the number of probable cases is likely to go up in the next day or two as some of the 50 people with fevers and aches under assessment for SARS are confirmed with the disease.

The number of cases could also grow substantially if Canada agrees to go along with a less rigorous definition of “probable” SARS cases used by the World Health Organization.

Toronto health officials spent much of Wednesday rebutting charges that Canada is reporting an artificially low number of cases in the most recent outbreak by adopting a more rigorous definition of SARS than that used by the WHO.

Under Canada’s definition, there have been 13 probable new cases in the latest round, three of them fatalities. An additional 20 individuals are listed as “suspect” cases.

But there were widespread charges Wednesday that Canada is using the stricter definition to avoid a new travel advisory from the WHO.

So far, the U.N. agency has stopped short of reissuing the advisory against traveling to Toronto that was in place during the initial SARS outbreak here this spring. Reports of 60 probable new cases, along with other criteria, could result in a renewal of the travel ban.

Dr. Donald Low, chief microbiologist at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital, told Canadian Broadcasting on Wednesday that the actual number of probable cases in the city is closer to 30.

But at a media briefing later in the day, Low backtracked somewhat and emphasized that all cases, both those listed as probable and the additional 20 listed as suspect, were receiving the same medical treatment.

“We don’t feel that we’re missing people that have the disease,” he said.

“The patients are treated the same way, they’re managed the same way, and their contacts are managed the same way.” In a related development Wednesday, Russia confirmed its first SARS case, although officials said the patient was recovering from the illness and able to walk around his hospital ward in the country’s Far East.

Russia, which borders China and Mongolia, has 30 suspected cases, but Wednesday’s confirmation marked the first clear case.

The patient is from Blagoveshchensk, a border town on the Amur River a few hundred yards from China. He is 25-year-old Denis Soinikov, who shared a hostel with Chinese traders selling goods in local markets, the Itar-Tass news agency reported.

“The diagnosis is unquestionable. This is SARS,” said Gennady Onishchenko, Russia’s chief epidemiologist.

Russia has closed many checkpoints on the Chinese and Mongolian borders in a bid to shut out the disease.

Also Wednesday, the WHO reported that there had been 8,240 cases of SARS worldwide and 745 deaths, an increase of 30 cases and 10 deaths over Tuesday.

Twenty-two of the new cases and five of the deaths were reported in Taiwan, according to a WHO statement.

In one piece of good news, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday that Dr. Chesley L. Richards -- who was part of a CDC team sent to Taiwan to investigate the outbreak, but who was flown home last week with symptoms of SARS -- apparently does not have the disease. Although the agency said it would conduct more tests, those performed had shown no evidence that Richards carries the SARS virus.

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Times staff writers Robyn Dixon in Moscow and Thomas H. Maugh II in Los Angeles contributed to this report.