Another Case of SARS Suspected in China

China reported a second suspected case of SARS on Thursday, even as the country’s first confirmed patient of the season was released from the hospital and officials hauled away thousands of civet cats for slaughter in an attempt to prevent further infections.

The announcement of the new case by the official New China News Agency said only that a waitress hospitalized in the southern city of Guangzhou was suspected of having severe acute respiratory syndrome.

China’s first SARS patient this season, a 32-year-old television producer, was released after recovering. He had been hospitalized since Dec. 20. Chinese and international experts spent weeks testing samples before declaring that he had the disease.

Authorities had quarantined 81 people who had contact with the man, but they said none had shown symptoms. Most have been released.

But in Hong Kong, three members of a television crew are being tested for SARS after they returned from southern China and developed fevers, the government said.

The TVB workers had visited a wild animal market and the SARS patient.

In Guangzhou, animal merchants watched Wednesday as government workers descended on China’s largest wildlife market and hauled off bagfuls of squirming civet cats.

“Restaurants won’t want to buy from here anymore,” said Liu Qiu, an animal seller. “We do disinfect here, but outsiders will think it’s full of deadly diseases.”

The civet, a weasel-like animal prized as a delicacy, is off city’s menus after researchers found similarities between a virus in the animals and in Guangzhou’s SARS patient.

Civets still in markets will be seized and killed by drowning or electrocution. Their remains will be boiled or burned. The government plans to kill all 10,000 civets in the area by Saturday, then move on to the next target: rats.

“Guangzhou’s Carpet Extermination of Rats,” said a headline in the newspaper Information Daily, reporting on the coming three-day campaign.

“The whole city united will go about killing rats, not leaving out one household.”

Roy Wadia, a World Health Organization spokesman in Beijing, noted that the agency’s experts who were searching for the possible source of the confirmed Guangzhou patient’s infection were examining rats from his apartment building. “But as to any confirmed links, there are none yet,” he said.