Danish patients not affected by corona virus

Six persons in Denmark who were thought to have been infected by a dangerous corona virus, are actually infected with common influenza, Danish health authorities said Wednesday. "There is no evidence of corona virus inside Denmark's borders," said Thyra Krause, chief medical officer at Statens Serum Institut, Denmark's national research facility for infectious diseases, which had been examining test results from the affected persons. "That means one should not be worried about it, but must still contact a doctor if one develops symptoms and has been in Qatar or Saudi Arabia within the past 10 days," she added. Corona viruses are a large family of viruses including those which cause the common cold, as well as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), an outbreak of which killed some 800 people in 2002. The six Danish patients had been admitted on Tuesday and Wednesday to isolation wards at Odense University Hospital (OUH), central Denmark, and at Hvidoevre Hospital in greater Copenhagen, and were being examined for symptoms of infection from a new corona virus. The new corona virus is thought to have an incubation period lasting seven to 10 days, and has previously been found among patients who had traveled from Qatar and Saudi Arabia. On Monday, the Danish Health and Medicines Authority advised persons who had traveled to Qatar or Saudi Arabia to seek medical advice if they experienced fever, cough or difficulty breathing within ten days of their return from these countries. Earlier, British health officials alerted the World Health Organization on Saturday of the new virus, after it had been found in a man transferred from Qatar to Britain on Sept. 11. The 49-year-old man, who is being treated in an intensive care unit at a London hospital for problems including kidney failure, had recently traveled to Saudi Arabia, where another man with an almost identical virus, had already died.