Your Voice Your Vote 2024

Live results
Last Updated: April 23, 10:42:16PM ET

Kansas Man Recovers From Suspected SARS

ByABC News via logo
April 1, 2003, 10:56 PM

April 2 -- A Kansas man who visited China recently and became seriously ill with symptoms matching those of the mysterious SARS seems to have recovered after a one-week quarantine that included taking antibiotics and having his lungs drained of fluid.

Mark VanCamp of Wichita traveled with his wife and children to China on Feb. 19 to pick up their newly adopted baby daughter, 10-month-old ZoraLin.

The family spent two weeks in Guangdong province, the section of the country where severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is believed to have originated. After returning home on March 5, he was the only member of the family who subsequently displayed signs of illness.

The tests that Mark VanCamp has taken for SARS so far have come back negative, but he expects to get further test results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by the end of this week.

"I started having respiratory problems in China, but I thought it was because of the humidity," he told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America. "When I got back to Wichita, I was still feeling sick and my doctor thought it was an internal muscle sprain, so he gave me a muscle relaxer. When I went back again, they thought I had pneumonia, and they gave me cough syrup."

After he became increasingly ill, his doctor prescribed an antibiotic.

"That's when my fever reached 101.5 and my wife read about SARS," he said.

As of now, the World Health Organization is reporting about 2,150 cases, with 78 deaths around the world, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Controland Prevention in Atlanta, said at a briefing today.

The CDC is reporting 85 suspected cases in the U.S. in 27 states, with no deaths. About 20 U.S. patients have developed pneumonia. The most-affected states are California and New York.

Among the U.S. cases, five involved people in households with SARS patients and two were health care workers caring for SARS patients. Most of the others were people exposed through travel.