Sars cases rise in Chinese province

After looking at secretive military hospitals in Beijing, the World Health Organisation today said its investigators will visit new parts of China amid a surge in cases of the deadly Sars virus in an inland province.

A WHO team that examined how China’s capital is handling severe acute respiratory syndrome was reporting its findings today to the Health Ministry. WHO had cautioned that failings by Beijing’s health system might let the flu-like disease spread.

“Additional WHO teams will travel soon to other parts of China,” WHO said on its Web site. An agency spokesman, James Palmer, had no details on where they would go but said it was likely to be decided by where most new cases were being reported.

Most of China’s 64 deaths and more than 1,400 cases of infection have been reported in Guangdong, a southern province with 45 fatalities and nearly 1,300 cases. Numbers of new cases there have been declining, prompting authorities to say the outbreak was under control.

But numbers elsewhere surged this week when three fatalities and 47 new infections were reported in the northern province of Shanxi, raising that region’s total to seven deaths and 82 cases. Three deaths and 17 infections have been reported in the Inner Mongolia region, also in the north.

WHO has warned that China’s poorer inland regions might lack the resources to cope with Sars.

In more prosperous Beijing, the agency said, the failure to trace people who had contact with those infected could allow the disease to spread. Beijing has reported four deaths and 37 cases.

Mr Palmer would not give details of what the WHO team was telling Chinese authorities about their five-day inspection in Beijing.

A WHO official said yesterday that Sars would not be fully understood until experts understand what is happening in China, where the disease is believed to have originated.

“Everything hinges on what we find out in China, as far as our projections,” Dr David Heymann, head of WHO’s Communicable Diseases Cluster, said in New York.

The WHO team in Beijing visited military hospitals yesterday to check rumours of unreported cases. Team member Dr James Maguire, of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said the visits were “very informative” but gave no more details.

WHO was looking into rumours of unreported SARS cases in Beijing military hospitals. A prominent military surgeon said last week that the Chinese capital had several times as many Sars cases as previously reported.

China has been accused of underreporting the extent of the outbreak, which Premier Wen Jiabao said last weekend ”remains grave”.

Also today, a teacher at a Beijing school said one of its classrooms had been closed and its students sent home after a classmate was suspected of contracting Sars.

The fourth-grade class at the First Zhongguancun Primary School was closed on Monday following the death last week of a student’s grandfather in a suspected Sars case, said the teacher. She said students are being checked at home by experts from the Beijing Health Bureau.