SARS virus found to be robust....

This from today's L.A. Times online:

The virus that causes SARS can survive in the environment much longer than researchers had suspected, the World Health Organization said Sunday, suggesting that halting transmission of the disease may be harder than they thought.

Research from laboratories around the world, posted on the WHO's Web site, indicates that the SARS coronavirus can persist on public surfaces for a day or longer and in feces from infected people for as long as four days — much longer than the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. It can survive even longer at low temperatures. And one commonly used detergent does not kill the virus as readily as researchers had hoped.

"This is the first time we have had hard data on the survival of the virus," said Dr. Klaus Stohr of the WHO, which is based in Geneva. "Before, we were just speculating."

Stohr cautioned that the full meaning of the findings will not become clear until researchers learn how much virus is necessary to trigger an infection. That the virus can persist for hours on, say, handrails in a bus station may not be important if there is not enough of the virus present to produce disease.

As of Sunday, SARS has sickened more than 6,300 people worldwide and killed at least 449--none in the U.S. Cases seem to be declining in Hong Kong and China; the latter having tripled the amount of money targeted for the disease to $725 million over the weekend. But authorities are concerned about the situation in Taiwan, where the spread of the disease seems to be accelerating.

Complete story here.