WHO warns travellers to avoid Beijing and Toronto

BEIJING and Toronto were declared pariah cities by the World Health Organisation yesterday which urged travellers to stay away.

Beijing, where SARS is believed to have originated, is the hardest hit place in China which has the world's highest SARS death toll with 106 fatalities.

Fear about the economic impact was growing, with a leading investment bank predicting China's economy, one of the fastest growing in the world, was likely to shrink this quarter. The World Trade Organisation said the epidemic would contribute to a gloomy year with global trade volume expected to rise by less than 3% after an already poor 2.5% rise last year.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended the postponement of non-essential travel to the Chinese capital, Shanxi province to the south-west and the Canadian city of Toronto for at least three weeks, twice the maximum incubation period. On April 4, the WHO warned travellers against going to the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where SARS is believed to have begun, and neighbouring Hong Kong.

"Today we are making further recommendations in that we are going to recommend people who have unnecessary travel to Shanxi, Beijing and to Toronto postpone travel, if possible," David Heymann, director of communicable diseases, told reporters. "As was the case for Hong Kong and Guangdong, we now have these areas which have a high magnitude of disease, a great risk of transmission locally and have also been exporting cases to other countries."

In Canada, the only country outside Asia where people have died from the disease, the death toll rose to 15. There are 324 probable or suspected cases, most of them in Toronto.

Hong Kong, which also reported more deaths and infections, announced a $1.5 billion package to help businesses reeling from the impact of the disease. The city has had 105 SARS deaths.

In Singapore, where there have been 189 infections and up to 17 deaths, alarm was growing over an outbreak among vendors at the city-state's largest vegetable market and the government threatened to jail people violating quarantine.

The illness, whose symptoms include high fever, a dry cough and difficulty in breathing, has killed more than 250 people around the world. Most patients survive, but health officials say the mortality rate has risen from 4% to 5.9% and there is no known cure. No one is sure in how many ways it can spread. Droplets from sneezing and coughing are one, but there is concern the virus may be transmitted by touching objects such as lift buttons and by fecal matter.

China has more than half of the world's more than 4,200 SARS cases and panic has begun surfacing after the government allowed state media to report fully on the disease. Beijing, a city of 14 million people, has reported almost 700 cases and 35 deaths.