South China's Guangdong?Province
is planning to set up a bank to store materials related to SARS,
the provincial disease prevention and control center said.
The center is one of the four institutions authorized by the
Health Ministry to store specimens taken from SARS patients,
suspected patients and those who had close contact with infected
patients, according to a Wednesday report in the Southern
Metropolitan News.
The other three are the national and Beijing disease prevention
and control centers and the country's military medical academy.
Xu Ruiheng, vice director-general of the Guangdong center, said
its extremely strict rules involving SARS research and specimen
storage would leave no possibility for medical staff to contract
the disease. Only 10 researchers would be allowed to enter a
laboratory where experiments on SARS and AIDS viruses are
conducted. The rules are laid down in a number of publications.
The laboratory, which has the highest security level in the
province and the second highest of a four-grade national standard,
is completely sealed and air must be filtered and disinfected three
times before being circulated.
The workers are inoculated against and tested for several
infectious diseases while those with skin scratches are banned from
the laboratory. Daily checks of body temperatures have already been
implemented.
(Shenzhen Daily, December 26, 2003)