Worst of outbreak over in some states

UN HEALTH chiefs yesterday said the worst of the SARS outbreak appeared to be over in Singapore, Hong Kong and Canada, while Vietnam has become the first country to contain the highly infectious disease.

But SARS is spreading in China, even as the government takes increasingly aggressive steps to halt the deadly virus, said David Heymann, the chief of communicable diseases for the UN's World Health Organisation.

Heymann, who is in Bangkok for today's emergency SARS summit of South-east Asian leaders, said the situation in China is worrying.

"In China, as you know, we are receiving more and more reports of cases and it does not appear it has peaked as far as spread" of the disease is concerned, he said.

Hong Kong, Singapore and Toronto are having fewer cases every day and Vietnam has reported no new SARS victims, the WHO said.

"It appears that the outbreak has peaked in those countries," Heymann said. There were eight new fatalities in China and five in Hong Kong reported yesterday, raising the worldwide death toll for severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) to at least 332. Most of the fatalities have been in China and Hong Kong. SARS has sickened around 5,000 people in more than 20 countries.

Asian governments kept up the fight with quarantines and travel restrictions.

Taiwan began enforcing a 10-day quarantine for visitors arriving from areas hit hard by SARS, prompting airlines to cancel some flights there, while Malaysia sealed off a Kuching hospital they fear may be the site of an outbreak. SARS has prompted a rare global alert from WHO and travel advisories against affected countries.

But UN officials lifted all travel advisories today for Vietnam, which had five deaths from SARS after the virus spread in February through Hanoi's only international hospital.

Sixty-three people contracted the virus in Vietnam.

But the Hanoi French Hospital was cordoned off on March 11, a move credited with slowing the rate of infection and keeping SARS from spreading beyond its doors.

"The WHO would like to congratulate Vietnam on being the first country in the world to contain SARS," Pascale Brudon, the WHO representative in Vietnam, said in Hanoi.

No new SARS cases have been reported in Vietnam since April 8. WHO has set a 20 day window double the disease's incubation period as the standard for lifting travel advisories and declaring that an outbreak is no longer spreading.

In Hong Kong, authorities said yesterday that another five SARS patients died, while 14 new cases were confirmed, the lowest yet since the government began releasing daily statistics last month.

The latest deaths in Hong Kong brought the territory's toll to 138.

In China, health officials raised the mainland's death toll to 140 yesterday and said 3,106 people have been confirmed infected an increase of 203 cases from the previous day's figures.

WHO head Gro Harlem Brundtland said there was still time to keep SARS from spreading globally, through travel warnings and checks of travellers for symptoms like fever, dry cough and shortness of breath. "We still have a chance to contain it and to have it go down in the places where outbreaks are already happening and avoid it spreading to new countries," he said.

In contrast to Vietnam, China has been widely criticised for failing to respond earlier to pleas for action to contain the disease, which surfaced in the southern province of Guangdong in November and spread internationally via travellers from Hong Kong.

But officials there have been taking strong action in recent days, sacking Beijing's mayor and the health minister and closing public schools in the capital.

Beijing closed the city's theatres, cinemas, Internet cafes and other public entertainment venues yesterday to "stop possible spread of the SARS virus and ensure public health," state media said.

Hundreds of builders were working around-the-clock on a new 1,000-bed isolation camp for SARS victims on Beijing's northern outskirts.