SARS Yet to Peak in China; Patrols Out in Beijing
Reuters
Tuesday, May 6, 2003; 8:07 AM
By John Ruwitch
BEIJING (Reuters) - The worst-hit district of China's capital sent thousands of investigators on a hunt for SARS on Tuesday as the World Health Organisation said the outbreak of the deadly virus had yet to peak in the world's most populous nation.
The army of SARS investigators was the latest sign of China's desperate fight to contain Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, a disease that has triggered riots by villagers furious that people from infected areas have been put among them.
Motorola, the world's second biggest mobile phone maker and one of the biggest foreign investors in China, meanwhile, closed its China headquarters in Beijing until Monday after a staff member there caught the disease.
"We have not seen a peak in China yet. We still have a considerable size of outbreak in Hong Kong," U.N. health chief Gro Harlem Brundtland said in Brussels, adding that it was too early to say whether the outbreak was receding worldwide.
Brundtland met European Union Health Commissioner David Byrne ahead of an emergency meeting of EU health ministers later on Tuesday to discuss how to prevent SARS spreading Europe.
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said on Monday the crisis remained "grave" despite stepped-up prevention, detection and treatment of the disease which has struck hardest in Beijing, where 1,960 cases have now been confirmed.
"A great deal of arduous work has to be done to bring the epidemic under control at an early date," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Wen as saying.
China's Health Ministry announced 138 new cases of SARS on Tuesday. It also reported eight more deaths, taking the toll in the world's most populous and worst-hit nation to 214.
SARS PATROLS
In Haidian, the Beijing district with more SARS cases than any other, some 30,000 investigators in 4,000 teams made rolling inspections of businesses, neighborhoods and work sites, district official Zhou Liangluo told reporters.
Twenty patrols have the job of making continuous examinations of the many construction sites in the district, China's high-technology hub where many uninsured migrant laborers work.
"For those who do not meet proper standards, they are put into overhaul and we'll suspend their operations," said Zhou, who took no questions and did not go into detail.
Households in the district of 2.2 million people have been given a thermometer and emergency contact numbers. Offices and businesses must install temperature-monitoring systems.
The flu-like disease has infected 4,409 people across China. Half of the deaths, 107 out of 214, have occurred in Beijing.
Nearly 7,000 people have been infected worldwide.
Hong Kong said on Tuesday the virus had killed six more people and infected a further nine. The death toll there is 193.
Elsewhere, there were signs the disease, which has caused panic and hurt the travel industry, may be coming under control.
The Philippines reported seven more cases, taking its total to 10, but said they were all on their way to recovery.
Singapore reported its first case in three days as its death toll rose to 27. The tourism board said a damaging drop in visitor arrivals due to SARS had probably bottomed out after a record plunge of 67 percent in April from a year earlier.
But the government said growth in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia remained hostage to the spread of SARS in China.
Thailand said health ministers from the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, which includes China and the United States, would meet in Bangkok on June 28 to assess efforts to combat SARS and revive business confidence
FEARS
In China, Motorola told about 1,000 employees to work from home until next Monday after 27 workers had close contact with the infected employee, spokeswoman Mary Lamb told Reuters.
Other foreign firms have closed offices or pulled employees out of China, reflecting a fear of the little-understood disease and a lack of confidence in China's ability to control it.
The University of California at Berkeley, a major U.S. university with links to Asia, said it would bar hundreds of Asian students from summer classes because of SARS fears.
In China's coastal Zhejiang province, 1,000 villagers smashed police and government cars over the weekend and demanded that about 10 people quarantined in a nearby building be moved away.
The quarantined people, none of whom had SARS symptoms, had been moved to a county hospital, a county official told Reuters.
Late last month, riots broke out in Linzhou, a small city in the central province of Henan, and in a town near Beijing over quarantine plans.
An official in Linzhou said on Tuesday the city's health chief and quarantine head had been dismissed after attacks on a hospital and quarantine station on April 27.
In Beijing, a city of 14 million people, 16,436 had been quarantined, Xinhua said.
But officials in the eastern city of Nanjing denied reports that 10,000 people had been quarantined there.
"No, no, no, that is not true," one city official told Reuters. "So far, we haven't finished compiling the statistics for quarantined people."
Only one person had caught SARS in the city and another seven were suspected of having it, he said.
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