Chinese outbreak kills five, prompts panic buying of medicine

BEIJING -- Anxious residents of southern China stocked up on medicine and wore surgical masks on the streets Tuesday after an unidentified illness killed at least five people, left hundreds hospitalized and sent health officials scrambling to find its source.

Drug companies' share prices on Chinese stock markets rose in apparent response. But authorities in the southern province of Guangdong, near Hong Kong, said the malady was under control. One doctor said the problem was "not as serious as the rumor."

Though Guangdong officials said only five people had died, rumors of hundreds of deaths prompted shoppers to clear store shelves of antibiotics and pay inflated prices for vinegar, which many Chinese use as a disinfectant. Lines formed at stores selling bulk vinegar, with clerks using funnels to fill jittery residents' empty plastic soda bottles.

Three hundred people have been hospitalized with pneumonia caused by the illness -- one-third of them doctors, nurses and other health workers -- said an official of the provincial Disease Prevention and Control Center. Fifty-nine had been treated and released, said the official, who declined to give his name.

Health Ministry investigators sent from Beijing were working to find the source of the malady, officials said, and hospitals have been given extra antibiotics, which can be used to treat infections that could result as a side effect from viruses.

Plague and anthrax were ruled out, the government's Xinhua News Agency said.

Officials wouldn't release further details of the deaths.

Disease 'under control'

At Guangzhou's railroad station, travelers waiting for trains covered their faces with surgical masks and tissues as they sat in large crowds.

"The disease is under control. It's not as serious as the rumor said. The priority now is to figure out what caused it," said a doctor at the No. 1 Hospital of the Guangzhou Medical School in Guangzhou. She wouldn't give her name.

The illness was first reported in November in four Guangdong cities including Zhongshan, about 60 miles northwest of Hong Kong, said the provincial disease-control official.

"We did not realize it was a serious epidemic, so we did not take it seriously at the beginning," the official said.

China's stock markets felt the impact. Share prices for drug companies and a major vinegar producer rose by up to 10 percent on Tuesday, and financial analysts cited the panic.

Southern China is a major source of new strains of flu and other viruses that are often traced to the poultry industry. An outbreak of bird flu in Hong Kong in 1997 killed six people and prompted the territory to slaughter all of its 1.4 million chickens.

The Guangzhou Baiyunshan Pharmaceutical Corp. said it had sent hundreds of boxes of anti-flu medications to pharmacies and hospitals since Saturday and was working around the clock to meet demand. Anti-inflammatory medicines were also selling briskly.

"They're almost completely out of stock," said a Xinhua report from Guangzhou.

People in Hong Kong and the Chinese territory of Macau, which borders Guangdong, also lined up Tuesday to buy vinegar. News reports said one Hong Kong shop limited buyers to six bottles each and doubled the price to $2.60.

Rumors that the illness had spread to the neighboring island province of Hainan prompted similar panicked buying of antibiotics there, though no cases have been confirmed, the official China News Service reported.