China reported a second suspected case of SARS on Thursday, even as the country's first confirmed SARS patient of the season was released from the hospital. The new suspected case, a 20-year-old waitress, was hospitalized with a fever on Dec. 31, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said she was under quarantine in Guangzhou's No. 8 People's Hospital. The announcement that she was officially a suspected case came just minutes after Xinhua reported that China's first SARS patient of the season, a 32-year-old television producer, left a Guangzhou hospital after being declared recovered. "His condition improved daily with the conventional treatment," Xinhua said. It didn't give any other details. Authorities had quarantined 81 people who had contact with the man, but say none has shown symptoms. Most have been released. Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong province, where the first outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome is believed to have begun in November 2002. It killed 58 people and spread worldwide, claiming a total of 774 lives before subsiding in July. The waitress came down with a fever on Dec. 26 and went to a hospital on Dec. 31, Xinhua said. Earlier news reports said she was isolated after x-rays showed possible inflammation of her lungs. Some 48 people who had "close contact" with her have been quarantined and 52 others were under unspecified close medical observation, but none has shown symptoms, Xinhua said. Phone calls to health authorities in Guangzhou on Thursday weren't answered. A spokesman in Beijing for the World Health Organization, Roy Wadia, said he didn't immediately have any more information on the waitress's case. A spokesman at the WHO's Asian headquarters in Manila, Peter Cordingley, said China's Ministry of Health had informed the agency of what Chinese officials called a "possible suspected SARS case." On Wednesday, officials in the Philippines released 38 people from home quarantine after a woman suspected of carrying SARS from Hong Kong was declared free of the virus. Officials said tests showed she had bacterial pneumonia. In Guangzhou on Wednesday, animal merchants watched aghast as government SARS fighters descended on China's largest wildlife market and hauled off bagfuls of squirming civet cats for slaughter. "Restaurants won't want to buy from here anymore," said Liu Qiu, an animal seller. "We do disinfect here, but outsiders will think it's full of deadly diseases. ... It might even affect China's international trade." The aggressive fight against suspected causes of SARS in the southern city of Guangzhou has just begun. The government plans to kill all 10,000 civet cats in the area by Saturday, then move on to the next target: rats. "Guangzhou's carpet extermination of rats," said a headline in the newspaper Information Daily, reporting on the coming three-day campaign. "The whole city united will go about killing rats, not leaving out one household." Given the suspected link between wild animals in Guangdong and the SARS virus that killed 774 people worldwide last year, city officials say "extraordinary measures" are needed. The civet, a weasel-like animal prized as a delicacy, is no longer on the city's menus after researchers found similarities between a virus found in the animals and in Guangzhou's SARS patient. Civets still in markets will be seized and killed by drowning or electrocution, their remains boiled into watery mist or burned. But while the intended effect is to make people feel safer, some merchants at the Xinyuan wild animal market reacted with alarm and dismay. "There's only one case of SARS, so why is it necessary to kill all the civets?" said one animal market worker, a 27-year-old native of Sichuan province who refused to give his name. "If civets are the suspected cause, it's better to quarantine and inspect them and then decide which ones have the disease and kill those," he said. "Now, people won't even want to come here to buy chickens or ducks." As he spoke, men in white-and-blue jumpsuits threw sackfuls of civets into a truck. When one civet jumped out, a worker grabbed it by the neck with heavy tongs while another hit it in the head with a metal rod. SARS didn't originate in the animal market, merchants insisted. "Experts say the excrement may be a cause of SARS, but they're not sure," said Liu, who once sold civets but now concentrates on rabbits. "They should confirm this question first." Restaurant supply manager Huang Zhaoze, buying chickens, said better sanitation would be good for the industry. "Fundamentally there is no problem with these markets, although they are dirty and have a bad smell," he said. "As soon as I go home, I immediately wash my hands. You have to take care of your personal hygiene." Wadia, the WHO spokesman in Beijing, noted that WHO experts who are searching for the possible source of the confirmed Guangzhou patient's infection are examining rats from his apartment building. "But as to any confirmed links, there are none yet," he said. Guangzhou holds an annual rat-killing drive, a Guangzhou Health Bureau spokesman said, but this year, "the second goal is to prevent the spread of SARS." Newspapers warned the public to take precautions against infection. "While killing rats, you must wear disinfected gloves," said the newspaper Guangzhou Daily. An illustration showed a gloved man plunging a cage full of rats into a bucket of water. **PHOTO CAPTION*** A civet cat that attempted to escape is held down by a health worker as another bludgeoned it to death at a wildlife market in Guangzhou, southern China, Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2004. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)