A killer bug with flu-like symptoms has claimed its ninth victim, prompting a worldwide alert over the contagious disease.The World Health Organisation said more than 100 people have been infected by the virus, which is sweeping the globe.
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was first detected in China in February - the two latest deaths were in Canada.
The cause of the bug, an atypical pneumonia, is not yet known.
"This syndrome is now a worldwide health threat," WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland said.
The illness starts with flu-like symptoms and can deteriorate rapidly into pneumonia.
It has infected mostly hospital staff in Hong Kong and Vietnam. Infection numbers have been creeping up steadily in Singapore and Taiwan.
The WHO said it had also received reports of cases of the disease in Indonesia and Thailand but it gave no details.
In southern China, 305 people contracted severe pneumonia in February and five later died but experts have not been able to establish a link.
In a rare "emergency travel advisory", the WHO said a Singapore doctor who treated some of the first pneumonia patients in the island republic had been taken ill during a flight to Frankfurt.
He is now in an isolation unit in Germany and 155 other passengers have been placed in quarantine.
The WHO is sending experts to Asia to try to track down the source of the illness and contain it.
The SARS outbreak follows a bird-flu virus, H5N1, that killed a Hong Kong man and infected his son in February.
But the government has said the new virus is not H5N1, which killed six people in Hong Kong in 1997 when it jumped mysteriously from birds to humans, sparking fears of an epidemic
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was first detected in China in February - the two latest deaths were in Canada.
The cause of the bug, an atypical pneumonia, is not yet known.
"This syndrome is now a worldwide health threat," WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland said.
The illness starts with flu-like symptoms and can deteriorate rapidly into pneumonia.
It has infected mostly hospital staff in Hong Kong and Vietnam. Infection numbers have been creeping up steadily in Singapore and Taiwan.
The WHO said it had also received reports of cases of the disease in Indonesia and Thailand but it gave no details.
In southern China, 305 people contracted severe pneumonia in February and five later died but experts have not been able to establish a link.
In a rare "emergency travel advisory", the WHO said a Singapore doctor who treated some of the first pneumonia patients in the island republic had been taken ill during a flight to Frankfurt.
He is now in an isolation unit in Germany and 155 other passengers have been placed in quarantine.
The WHO is sending experts to Asia to try to track down the source of the illness and contain it.
The SARS outbreak follows a bird-flu virus, H5N1, that killed a Hong Kong man and infected his son in February.
But the government has said the new virus is not H5N1, which killed six people in Hong Kong in 1997 when it jumped mysteriously from birds to humans, sparking fears of an epidemic
