Toronto wants hundreds to go into SARS quarantine

TORONTO — Canadian health officials yesterday asked more than 1,400 people to go into quarantine in Toronto as investigators scrambled to trace a renewed outbreak of SARS.

Hitting four hospitals and perhaps 52 people only two weeks after Toronto was effectively declared free of severe acute respiratory syndrome, the new outbreak led the World Health Organization to return Toronto to its list of SARS sites.

WHO did not warn travelers against coming to Toronto, but said it was concerned about the new transmissions of the virus, which has infected 8,202 people worldwide and killed 725.

In a situation that resembled the beginning of the epidemic here in March, Canadian officials restricted access to the four hospitals and their emergency rooms and asked 141 health-care workers, including paramedics, to go into "work quarantine," in which they will stay on the job but wear masks at home and avoid public transportation. Most of the others told to go into quarantine were hospital visitors who might have come into contact there with the SARS virus.

Canadian authorities said the country now has 11 active probable SARS cases and 41 suspected cases. Theories of how the virus spread anew are focusing on a 96-year-old surgical patient who was thought to have pneumonia. Authorities still do not know how he contracted SARS.

Toronto, site of the largest number of SARS cases outside Asia, has been battling the disease since March, when a woman returned from a trip to Hong Kong carrying the virus. At the height of the crisis, more than 290 people were infected in Ontario. Twenty-seven people have died in the country, according to Canadian figures.