SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore expects to quarantine up to 2,400 people to help contain the spread of SARS, after ordering a food market to shut because three people who worked there had contracted the deadly virus.
A vegetable seller who has died is thought to have spread the disease to two other workers at Singapore's largest wholesale market for leafy vegetables, and also infected his wife and a taxi driver who regularly drove him to the market.
Fourteen people have died in Singapore from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and another two are suspected to have died from it. More than 200 people have died worldwide.
The number of confirmed cases in Singapore has risen to 178, the fourth highest in the world, and Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said on Saturday the city state could be facing its worst crisis.
The outbreak at the Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market was a blow to hopes that the disease would be confined mainly to patients and staff in hospitals -- where most of Singapore's infections have occurred -- and people who have had close contact with them.
The health ministry was trying to trace on Sunday those who might have been in contact with the workers at the market, which will be shut for three days.
"We see this as an extra precautionary measure," Minister of Health Lim Hng Kiang told a news conference. "We don't see that out of the two thousand over people that we impose home quarantine (on), that a high percentage of them will come down with this problem."
The ministry has estimated that there are 800 tenants in the market and each of them has an average of two workers. It will be tracing contacts in the next few days and will require a 10-day quarantine for those affected.
Radio and newspapers on the island state of four million asked people who had been to the market between April 5 and 18, a span of two weeks in which infections could have spread, to be alert for SARS symptoms such as a fever and cough.
One of the infected workers, who died on April 12, was the brother of a hospitalized SARS patient. The worker and his wife, who has been diagnosed as a probable SARS case, were regular passengers of the ill taxi driver.
The taxi driver was the second to contract SARS, a development that is likely to scare more people off taking cabs. Business was already falling after a driver with a history of ferrying passengers to hospitals came down with SARS last week.
Goh and other officials warned Singaporeans at the weekend not to allow fears of the disease to take the fragile economy into a tailspin.
The prime minister said the battle to isolate and contain the outbreak was showing some success in limiting infection rates, but more efforts were need to tackle a climate of fear that was causing widespread damage to the transport and tourism sector.
Some 104 people in Singapore have recovered from SARS and the authorities are closely watching another 87 people, including seven children, who may have caught the disease.
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A vegetable seller who has died is thought to have spread the disease to two other workers at Singapore's largest wholesale market for leafy vegetables, and also infected his wife and a taxi driver who regularly drove him to the market.
Fourteen people have died in Singapore from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and another two are suspected to have died from it. More than 200 people have died worldwide.
The number of confirmed cases in Singapore has risen to 178, the fourth highest in the world, and Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said on Saturday the city state could be facing its worst crisis.
The outbreak at the Pasir Panjang Wholesale Market was a blow to hopes that the disease would be confined mainly to patients and staff in hospitals -- where most of Singapore's infections have occurred -- and people who have had close contact with them.
The health ministry was trying to trace on Sunday those who might have been in contact with the workers at the market, which will be shut for three days.
"We see this as an extra precautionary measure," Minister of Health Lim Hng Kiang told a news conference. "We don't see that out of the two thousand over people that we impose home quarantine (on), that a high percentage of them will come down with this problem."
The ministry has estimated that there are 800 tenants in the market and each of them has an average of two workers. It will be tracing contacts in the next few days and will require a 10-day quarantine for those affected.
Radio and newspapers on the island state of four million asked people who had been to the market between April 5 and 18, a span of two weeks in which infections could have spread, to be alert for SARS symptoms such as a fever and cough.
One of the infected workers, who died on April 12, was the brother of a hospitalized SARS patient. The worker and his wife, who has been diagnosed as a probable SARS case, were regular passengers of the ill taxi driver.
The taxi driver was the second to contract SARS, a development that is likely to scare more people off taking cabs. Business was already falling after a driver with a history of ferrying passengers to hospitals came down with SARS last week.
Goh and other officials warned Singaporeans at the weekend not to allow fears of the disease to take the fragile economy into a tailspin.
The prime minister said the battle to isolate and contain the outbreak was showing some success in limiting infection rates, but more efforts were need to tackle a climate of fear that was causing widespread damage to the transport and tourism sector.
Some 104 people in Singapore have recovered from SARS and the authorities are closely watching another 87 people, including seven children, who may have caught the disease.
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