Mystery China virus patients could have infected family members: Officials

Sex delays menopause

BEIJING: A new virus from the same family as the deadly SARS pathogen could have been spread between family members in the Chinese city of Wuhan, local authorities said yesterday. The outbreak, which has killed one person, has caused alarm because of the link with SARS (Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which killed 349 people in mainland China and another 299 in Hong Kong in 2002-2003.

One of the 41 patients reported in the city could have been infected by her husband, Wuhan’s health commission said in a statement yesterday. The announcement follows news that a Chinese woman had been diagnosed with the novel coronavirus in Thailand after travelling there from Wuhan. No human-to-human transmission of the virus behind the Wuhan outbreak has been confirmed so far, but the health commission said the possibility “cannot be excluded.”

The commission said that one man who had been diagnosed worked at Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which has been identified as the center of the outbreak, but his wife had been diagnosed with the illness despite reporting “no history of exposure” at the market.

At a press conference yesterday following a fact-finding trip to Wuhan, Hong Kong health officials also said that the possibility of human-to-human transmission could not be ruled out despite no “definitive evidence.”

Dr Chuang Shuk-kwan, from Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection, said there were two family group cases among the recorded cases in Wuhan, including the husband and wife and a separate case of a father, son and nephew living together.

However, he said mainland doctors believed the three men were most likely to have been exposed to the same virus in the market. The market has been closed since January 1. The woman diagnosed in Thailand, who is currently in a stable condition, had not reported visiting the seafood market, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.

WHO doctor Maria Van Kerkhove said Tuesday that they “wouldn’t be surprised if there was some limited human-to-human transmission, especially among families who have close contact with one another.” The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a Level 1 “Watch” alert for travellers to Wuhan after the patient was diagnosed in Thailand, saying they should practice normal precautions and avoid contact with animals and sick people. Wuhan’s health commission said yesterday that most of the patients diagnosed with the virus were male, and many were middle-aged or elderly.

In Hong Kong, hospitals have raised their alert level to “serious” and stepped up detection measures including temperature checkpoints for inbound travellers. Hong Kong authorities said on Tuesday that the number of people hospitalized with fever or respiratory symptoms in recent days after travelling to Wuhan had grown to 71, including seven new cases since Friday. Sixty of that total, however, have already been discharged. None have yet been diagnosed with the new coronavirus. — AFP

PARIS: Women approaching menopause who have frequent sex are less likely to cross that threshold than women of the same age who are not as active sexually, researchers said yesterday. On average, intimate relations at least once a week reduced the chances of entering menopause by 28 percent compared to women who had sex less than once a month, they reported in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

The difference, the study suggests, reflects the body’s response to evolutionary pressures. “If a woman is having little or infrequent sex when approaching midlife, then the body will not be receiving the physical cues of a possible pregnancy,” Megan Arnot and Ruth Mace, scientists at University College London, wrote. Rather than continuing to ovulate, according to this theory, “it would be better — from a fitness-maximizing perspective — for the woman to cease fertility and invest energy into any existing kin she has.”

Post-menopausal killer whales — the only animals besides humans and pilot whales to go through menopause — are known to care for grandchildren, a behavior sometimes called the “grandmother effect” that is thought to serve an evolutionary purpose. Earlier research seeking to explain why married women reach menopause later than never-married or divorced women points to the influence of male pheromones, natural chemicals in the animal kingdom that attract the opposite sex.

To find out whether either theory held water, Arnot and Mace examined data on nearly 3,000 women in the United States recruited in 1996 and 1997 to take part in a multi-decade health study. Known as SWAN, the project was designed to collect data and track changes — both biological and psychological — that occur alongside menopause.

The average age of the women going into the study was 46. None had entered menopause, but just under half were “peri-menopausal”, with minor symptoms beginning to appear. During the following decade, 45 percent of the women experienced a natural menopause, at an average age of 52. Going into the study, nearly 78 percent of the women were married or in a relationship with a man, and 68 percent lived with their partner.— AFP