A TEAM of World Health Organisation (WHO) experts are to visit two suspected SARS patients in a southern Chinese hospital as tourists began canceling trips to disease-hit Guangdong province.

Another suspected case of SARS emerged in southern China today as international medical investigators scoured an apartment block to determine if it played any role in the infection of a man who lived there – the season’s only confirmed case of the virus so far.

RACING against a self-imposed deadline, Chinese authorities drowned or electrocuted the first of thousands of civet cats yesterday in an urgent effort to eliminate a possible source of the SARS virus.