China under fire over spread of Sars

By JONATHAN ANSFIELD and AMRAN ABOCAR

BEIJING/TORONTO - China came under fire yesterday for the way it handled a killer respiratory disease and the top US health official said Beijing had missed a chance to curb the epidemic.

The World Health Organisation said China had failed to report all known cases, and the capital, Beijing, could have five times the official number.

In Canada, the only country outside Asia where people have died of SARS, Catholics prepared to celebrate Easter with a little less physical contact.

In Singapore and Hong Kong, the areas outside mainland China worst-hit by the virus, officials installed detectors at airports to help spot travellers with fever.

The virus that causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has been carried by air travellers to around 22 countries in the past six weeks, infecting more than 3400 people and killing about 160 worldwide.

Officially identified as a previously unseen relative of a common cold virus, SARS is contagious and sometimes fatal, and has no known cure.

WHO contagious disease expert Dr David Heymann said the organisation was sending reinforcements to China where the epidemic is believed to have started last November.

A WHO team in Beijing said China was still failing to report all its cases, even though Beijing officials had pledged co-operation.

"Indeed there have been cases of SARS -- there is no question about that -- that have also not been reported officially," WHO virologist Wolfgang Preiser said after a visit to a military hospital in Beijing.

"The military seems to have its own reporting system which does not link in presently with the municipal one," he told a news conference.

The WHO team estimated there could be up to 200 cases of SARS in Beijing, although the Chinese government has officially reported only 37.

SARS has killed at least 65 people and infected 1,445 in mainland China -- nearly half of the world's cases -- since it first surfaced in the southern province of Guangdong.

"We've been very upset with the transparency of the Chinese government ... We think lives could have been saved. We could have controlled it," US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson told Reuters in Rome.

In Canada, where SARS has killed 13 people and infected as many as 296, Roman Catholic leaders adjusted communion and confession rituals for Easter, after 500 members were sent into quarantine when 29 people and two doctors who treated them were diagnosed as probable or suspect cases.

Church leaders in Toronto said worshipers will not sip wine from a communal cup and the communion wafer, usually placed on the tongue by a priest or an assistant, will be put into churchgoers' hands.

Confessions will be made outside the confessional booth, congregants will bow instead of shaking hands, and will bow or genuflect instead of kissing the crucifix.

With Easter weekend coming up -- the holiest time in the Christian calendar during which Catholics often attend several days of services -- officials even suggested people stay home.

"The outbreak of SARS has created an environment where people just don't want to gather," said one Toronto businessman who said he would not attend any religious services this week.

Health officials in Ontario, the hardest hit province, said they were considering using electronic surveillance to enforce quarantine.

In Singapore and Hong Kong, airports are being equipped with thermal imaging systems that can pinpoint feverish passengers. A high fever is a hallmark of SARS.

A passenger stands in front of the system that will check the body temperature. Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, said air travellers leaving Hong Kong will be tested.

Hong Kong doctors said they believed the virus was becoming more virulent there, taking the lives of younger patients than had been seen before.

However, WHO officials discounted this fear, saying young, healthy people had died from the disease in its early stages.

While older health workers were among the first affected, it would strike younger patients as it spread into other populations, Heymann said.

- REUTERS