Japan steps up SARS plans.

Japan is to form a team of experts later this year to combat outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a newspaper reported last week, as a third suspected case of the disease emerged in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the health and welfare ministry will dispatch teams of doctors to affected regions to treat victims of SARS and other—new—infectious diseases and try to locate the source of the outbreaks.

Their work will be coordinated by staff at an international epidemic disease centre—the first of its kind in Japan—due to open in October at the International Medical Centre of Japan in Tokyo. The health ministry will provide ¥46 million (US$430 000) for the unit in its first year, according to the Yomiuri.

The initiative is an attempt by Japanese authorities to play a bigger part in preventing a repeat of last year's SARS outbreak, which killed more than 700 people and infected at least 8000 others.

Although Japan sent a team of doctors to China to treat SARS patients last May, critics say it lags behind the USA and Europe in efforts to deal with new and virulent strains of influenza and other diseases.

A reminder of the threat posed by infectious diseases, including those, like SARS, which are suspected of originating in animals, came last week when a team from Tokyo University said they had discovered a once-dormant type A strain of influenza in seals in the Caspian Sea. Type A viruses were behind the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968–69 that killed about 1 million people.

Nobuyuki Miyazaki, from the university's Ocean Research Institute, said the flu strain, which passed from human beings to seals via airborne infection in 1979, had become active among the local seal population.

“There is a possibility that in the future, the virus will pass back from seals to humans”, he told The Lancet. “The reappearance of the virus after so many years could mean that people's immune systems will no longer be able to fight it.”

Miyazaki said recent outbreaks of avian flu in Asia, including the first case in Japan for 79 years, proved that more research needed to be done into the relationship between viruses in human beings and wild animals.

“As our Caspian Sea investigation shows, we need to develop a system to prevent viral infections being passed from animals to the human population. SARS and bird flu are typical examples.”