SARS Doctor Dies Of Mystery Illness

The doctor who was the first to identify an outbreak of a deadly mystery illness died of the disease Saturday, the World Health Organization said.

Italian Dr. Carlo Urbani, 46, an expert on communicable diseases with the U.N. health agency, died in Thailand, where he had been receiving treatment after becoming infected while working in Vietnam.

Urbani, who worked in the public health programs in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, was the first to identify the disease — known as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome — in an American businessman who had been admitted to a hospital in Hanoi and later died there.

WHO said Urbani's work had allowed it to increase its surveillance of the disease rapidly, with many new cases being identified and isolated before they infected hospital staff.

"Carlo was a wonderful human being and we are all devastated," said Pascale Brudon, the WHO representative in Vietnam.

"Carlo was the one who very quickly saw that this was something very strange. When people became very concerned in the hospital, he was there every day, collecting samples, talking to the staff and strengthening infection control procedures."

Urbani, who was married with three children, was also president of Doctors Without Borders-Italy.

"Carlo Urbani's death saddens us all deeply at WHO," Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said. "His life reminds us again of our true work in public health. Today, we should all pause for a moment and remember the life of this outstanding physician."

To date, SARS has killed at least 55 people and sickened 1,485. The biggest number of cases and deaths has been in China's Guangdong province, where an earlier outbreak began in November.