More proof of animal link to Sars

World Health Organisation investigators have found "very good evidence" to suggest that animals play a role in Sars, uncovering traces of the virus in the restaurant where a suspected patient worked and civet cats were served.

But chief investigator Dr Robert Breiman also said that Sars should not be considered an immediate public health threat in China - a reassurance pivotal in its timing, days before hundreds of millions of people begin travelling around the country for the Chinese New Year.

In samples from the restaurant that employed a 20-year-old waitress suspected of having Sars "tests revealed on each [civet] cage the Sars coronavirus," Breiman said. "Not only were there civet cats there, but at some point civet cats that were carrying the Sars coronavirus," he said.

Traces had also been found on swabs taken from the city's largest live-animal market.

"I think there is very good evidence to think animals are the reservoir and the way the disease gets started," Breiman said, adding: "We still don't know what role the civet cats play in spreading the virus."

Wild animals have long been a delicacy in Guangdong province, and many suspect that exposure to or consumption of them may be linked to the spread of Sars - and even its origins in late 2002.

Breiman emphasised that there was no way to know when the virus was deposited in the restaurant's cages or whether it was connected to the waitress' case.

Guangdong has spent much of the week eradicating thousands of rats, a week after it carried out a mass eradication of civets.

Meanwhile, Vietnam has banned the sale of poultry in Ho Chi Minh City as it steps up attempts to curb a fast-spreading bird flu that has killed at least three people and resulted in the deaths of nearly two million chickens.

These chickens have been culled or killed by the flu in the southeast Asian nation, and the number culled in Japan and South Korea runs into the hundreds of thousands.

- REUTERS