[Clinical investigation of outbreak of nosocomial severe acute respiratory syndrome].

Objective: To summarize and analyze the clinical manifestation, diagnosis and therapeutic strategy of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and its characteristics of outbreak in hospital via infection transmission cluster associated with SARS patients.

Methods: (1) Two hospitalized community acquired SARS cases with their clinical data and epidemiologically linked transmission clusters in our hospital were analyzed; (2) The clinical data from 41 SARS cases were summarized.

Results: (1) The contagiousness of SARS virus in SARS patients was extremely strong, especially in their acute stage. (2) The majority of clinical manifestations were fever (100% cases), and there were no obvious respiratory symptoms in more than half of the patients (53.7%) at early SARS stage (day 1 to day 3), accompanied by leucopenia(52.6%) and lymphopenia (68.4%). (3) Timely administration of Ribavirin, Methylprednisolone, immunoenhancer (such as interferon alpha-2b, thymosin-alpha1) to SARS patients was efficacious to certain extent in controlling the development of the disease.

Conclusion: It is very important for clinicians to pay great attention to protect themselves from infection of SARS. Early discovery of SARS, early isolation of SARS patients, and early treatment are very helpful to improving patient's prognosis and controlling SARS overspread.