Kolkata: The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus stalking the world has cast its shadow on the metropolis with fearful neighbours and over-zealous officials hauling off people suffering from even the common cold to hospital.

Asitava Purakayastha, a textile machinery expert admitted to a hospital on April 20 for a heart ailment, was bundled off to the Beliaghata Infectious Disease Hospital by doctors on April 21 as soon as they came to know that he had recently visited China.

Dr D Mukherjee, under whom the expert was admitted to the ID Hospital, said that Purakayastha, had showed no sign of SARS and being a heart patient, had been referred to SSKM hospital.

Of the 5 patients admitted in the hospital, four had been discharged and the fifth, who arrived in Kolkata with fever on April 18 after spending some months in Bangkok, had also not shown any symptom of the deadly disease.

The last patient a resident of East Kolkata, was forced to seek admission to the hospital by his neighbours within hours of landing in Kolkata and was awaiting results of the tests done on him.

Another patient had been sent to the hospital from Midnapore by a central government dispensary as a suspected SARS patient though he neither showed any symptom nor had he visited any of the SARS affected countries.

Meanwhile, a Japanese tourist fought his way out of the hospital and fled in a taxi after being taken to the emergency ward.

The incidents demonstrated that even doctors in some cases seemed unaware of the basic guidelines laid down by the World Health Organisation for determining a carrier of the deadly form of the corona virus, Mukherjee added.

PTI