Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2004
Between 1 and 22 March 2003, a nosocomial outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) occurred at the Communicable Disease Centre in Tan Tock Seng Hospital, Singapore, the national treatment and isolation facility for patients with SARS. A case-control study with 36 cases and 50 controls was conducted of factors associated with the transmission of SARS within the hospital. In univariate analysis, contact with respiratory secretions elevated the odds ratio to 6·9 (95% CI 1·4–34·6, P=0·02). Protection was conferred by hand washing (OR 0·06, 95% CI 0·007–0·5, P=0·03) and wearing of N95 masks (OR 0·1, 95% CI 0·03–0·4, P=0·001). Use of gloves and gowns had no effect. Multivariate analysis confirmed the strong role of contact with respiratory secretions (adjusted OR 21·8, 95% CI 1·7–274·8, P=0·017). Both hand washing (adjusted OR 0·07, 95% CI 0·008–0·66, P=0·02) and wearing of N95 masks (adjusted OR 0·1, 95% CI 0·02–0·86, P=0·04) remained strongly protective but gowns and gloves had no effect.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.