By Geoffrey Cowley NEWSWEEK

    May 5 issue —  SARS may have dominated the headlines last week, but it wasn’t the only weird disease on the World Health Organization’s radar screen. In central Africa, an outbreak of the dreaded Ebola fever had stretched into its fifth month. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a virulent new strain of avian flu was wiping out entire chicken farms. Dutch farmers recently slaughtered 18 million birds in hopes of stopping the outbreak. Yet the bird flu has spread to several provinces and jumped from poultry to pigs and even people, causing 83 human cases. Most of the infected people have suffered only eye inflammation, but some have developed respiratory illness. One of them, a 57-year-old veterinary surgeon, recently died of pneumonia. “Bird flu virus was... found in the lungs,” according to an April 19 statement from the Dutch Agriculture Ministry, “and no other cause of death could be detected.” Sound familiar?     Has the SARS epidemic caused you to change your lifestyle at all? Yes, I've changed my travel plans to avoid SARS-stricken cities Not much, but I bought a protective face mask--just in case Not at all

Vote to see results Has the SARS epidemic caused you to change your lifestyle at all?* 19703 responses Yes, I've changed my travel plans to avoid SARS-stricken cities 21% Not much, but I bought a protective face mask--just in case 5% Not at all 74% Survey results tallied every 60 seconds. Live Votes reflect respondents' views and are not scientifically valid surveys.

	        SARS. Ebola. Avian flu. The parade of frightening new maladies continues, each one confirming that our species, for all its cleverness, still lives at the mercy of the microbe. It didn’t seem that way 30 years ago—not with smallpox largely defeated, AIDS still undreamed of and medical science evolving at an unprecedented clip. But even as optimists proclaimed victory over the germ, our megacities, factory farms, jet planes and blood banks were opening broad new avenues for infection. The dark side of progress is now unmistakable; many of the advances that have made our lives more comfortable have also made them more dangerous. Some 30 new diseases have cropped up since the mid-1970s—causing tens of millions of deaths—and forgotten scourges have resurfaced with alarming regularity. “Infectious diseases will continue to emerge,” the Institute of Medicine declares in a new report, warning that complacency and inaction could lead to a “catastrophic storm” of contagion. So what’s to be done? As the SARS outbreak has shown, surveillance is critical. By spotting new infections wherever they occur, and working globally to contain them, we can greatly reduce their impact. But is preparedness our ultimate weapon? Do we know enough about the genesis of new diseases to prevent them? Could we avert the next SARS? The next AIDS? What would a reasonable strategy look like?

        We don’t hold all the cards in this game. Most new diseases begin when a person catches something from an animal—a transaction shaped by chance or even the weather. When healthy young adults started dying of a SARS-like syndrome in New Mexico 10 years ago, it took health experts several weeks of intensive lab work to identify the culprit. To the scientists’ amazement, it wasn’t a human pathogen at all. It was a novel member of the hantavirus family, a group of rodent viruses that sometimes spread through the air after rats or mice shed them in their urine. The previous outbreaks had occurred in Asia. So why were people dying in New Mexico? Scientists now believe the American mice had harbored the virus all along but had never been populous enough to scatter infectious doses in people’s toolsheds and basements. What changed the equation that year was El Niño. The ocean disturbance caused an unusually warm winter in the Southwest. The mouse population exploded as a result—and the hantavirus got a free ride.

       Until someone harnesses the jet stream, such accidents are sure to happen. But quirky weather isn’t the greatest threat we face. As ecologists study the causes of disease emergence, they’re finding that human enterprise is a far more significant force. Almost any activity that disrupts a natural environment can enhance the mobility of disease-causing microbes. Consider what happened in the 1980s, when farmers in Venezuela’s Portuguesa state cleared millions of acres of forest to create cropland. The farms drew as many rats and mice as people, and the rodents introduced a deadly new virus into the region. The so-called Guanarito virus causes fever, shock and hemorrhaging. It infected more than 100 people, leaving a third of them dead.

1 / 5 SARS: common questions NBC’s Robert Bazell explains the basics about SARS.2 / 5 China says it will set up health network to combat SARSChina says it will spend $500 million to set up a nationwide health network to combat SARS. NBC’s Ned Colt reports from Beijing.3 / 5 SARS: fear in NYIt is an unwelcome effect in Asian neighborhoods, including New York City’s sizeable Chinatown. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.4 / 5 Asia tries to coordinate SARS planChina is ground zero for SARS, especially the capital of Beijing. NBC’s Ned Colt reports from there.5 / 5 Toronto and SARSThe SARS outbreak has devastated business in Toronto, where restaurants are empty and hotel occupancy rates were already down almost 25 percent. NBC’s Don Lemon reports.

        Malaysian pig farmers had a similar experience in 1999, after they started pushing back the forest to expand their operations. As barns replaced forestland, displaced fruit bats started living in the rafters, bombarding the pigs’ drinking water with a pathogen now known as the Nipah virus. “The pigs developed an explosive cough that became known as the one-mile cough because you could hear it from so far away,” says Mary Pearl, president of the Wildlife Trust in Palisades, N.Y. The virus soon spread from the pigs to their keepers, causing extreme brain inflammation and killing 40 percent of the affected people. The outbreak ended when Malaysian authorities closed eight farms and slaughtered a million pigs.         The point is not that rain forests are dangerous. It’s that blindly rearranging ecosystems can be hazardous to our health—whether we’re in the Amazon Basin or the woods of Connecticut. That’s where Lyme disease emerged, and it, too, is a product of the way we user our land. Borrelia burg-dorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme, lives in the bodies of deer and white-footed mice, passing between those animals in the heads of biting ticks. People have crossed paths with all these critters for generations, yet the first known case of Lyme disease dates back only to 1975. Why did we suddenly become vulnerable? Richard Ostfeld, an animal ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., has tied the event to suburban development. In open woodlands, foxes and bobcats keep a lid on the Lyme agent by hunting the mice that carry it. But the predators vanish when developers chop woodlands into subdivisions, and the mice and their ticks proliferate unnaturally. In a recent survey of woodlots in New York, Ostfeld found that infected ticks were some seven times as prevalent on —one- and two-acre lots as they were on lots of 10 to 15 acres. His bottom line: “You’re more likely to get Lyme disease in Scarsdale than the Catskills.” May 5, 2003 Issue Cover: SARS--What You Need to Know •  The Mystery of SARS •  How Progress Makes Us Sick •  Economies on Empty        Fortunately, you’re not likely to spread it in either place. Even when a microbe succeeds at leaping from one species to another, the new host is often a dead end. Neither Nipah nor Guanarito can spread from person to person. The hantaviruses have the same problem. And a tick could suck on a Lyme-disease patient all day without getting enough bacteria to infect its next host. The infections we get from primates and pigs are a whole different story. When the Ebola virus jumps from an ape into a person, it often races through a family or a hospital before burning itself out. And HIV is still spreading steadily after three decades of person-to-person transmission. It has infected some 60 million people since crossing over from chimpanzees, and its emergence was no fluke of the weather. We placed ourselves in the path of the virus, we moved it around the world, and we’re well poised to do it again.

 fact file  SARS virus cases

Number of people affected by the flu-like virus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) worldwide. As of May 1, 2003 | 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered China 3,638 170 1,351 Hong Kong 1,600 162 834 Singapore 201 25 143 Canada 147 20 87 Taiwan 89 3 25 Vietnam 63 5 56 USA 54   23 Italy 9   4 Thailand 7 2 5 Germany 7   7 Malaysia 6 2 3| 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered Britain 6   6 Mongolia 6   3 France 5   1 Philippines 4 2 1 Australia 4   4 Sweden 3   2 Brazil 2   2 Indonesia 2   1 Japan 2     Bulgaria 1     India 1   1| 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered Ireland 1   1 Kuwait 1   1 Macao 1     Poland 1     Romania 1   1 South Africa 1     South Korea 1     Spain 1   1 Switzerland 1   1

• Includes number of deaths, recoveries and current cases Source: World Health Organization Printable version        The human AIDS viruses are descended from simian pathogens known as SIVs. HIV-1 is essentially a chimpanzee virus, while HIV-2 (a rarer and milder bug) comes from the sooty mangabey (a monkey). How did the chimp virus make its way into humans? The best guess is that African hunters contracted it while butchering animals, and then passed it on through sexual contact. Until a few decades ago, that hunting accident would have been a local misfortune, a curse played out in a few rural villages. What turned it into a holocaust was not just a new infectious agent but a proliferation of roads, cities and airports, a breakdown of social traditions, and the advent of blood banking and needle sharing. Those conditions virtually sealed HIV’s success, and they continue to rocket obscure bugs into every corner of the world. “The volume and speed of travel are unprecedented,” says Dr. Mary Wilson of Harvard. “We are interconnected in ways that weren’t true a century ago.”

• Learn more about the disease       SARS is only the latest reminder of how powerful those connections can be. The novel coronavirus that causes the syndrome emerged from Guangdong, the same Chinese province that delivers new flu viruses to the world most years. Pigs, ducks, chickens and people live cheek-by-jowl on the district’s primitive farms, exchanging flu and cold germs so rapidly that a single pig can easily incubate human and avian viruses simultaneously. The dual infections can generate hybrids that escape antibodies aimed at the originals, setting off a whole new chain of human infection. The clincher is that these farms sit just a few miles from Guangzhou, a teeming city that mixes people, animals and microbes from the countryside with travelers from around the world. You could hardly design a better system for turning small outbreaks into big ones.         For all the fear it has caused, SARS clearly isn’t the big one, at least not in its current incarnation. The coronavirus that causes it is as nasty as any flu virus, but it doesn’t get around very easily. And as University of Louisville evolutionist Paul Ewald points out, an epidemic can’t sustain itself unless each patient infects more than one other person. “If each SARS case were generating even two others,” he says, “we would have seen hundreds of thousands by now.” A doomsday flu virus would approach the virulence of the SARS agent, but it would infect people by the roomful.

Such pandemic flu viruses have emerged in the past, and many experts believe it’s only a matter of time until it happens again. How can we lessen the danger? A long-term strategy would have to include modernizing the world’s farms, improving basic health care and stockpiling vaccines and antiviral drugs. As science illuminates the ecology of infectious disease, it may also inspire wiser, safer approaches to land use and wilderness preservation. Until then, surveillance will be doubly important. The good news is that the forces making microbes so mobile are also making them easier to track. Ten years ago, quick communication was still a problem for many health departments, says Stephen Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “A colleague in Russia had a fax but no fax paper. A colleague in Ghana had telex but no fax. In other places they had a telephone but no telex.” Today even the most remote surveillance stations are tied into the Web-based Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases. The world’s largest health agencies have created similar systems for sharing scientific research. Such systems are only as good as the openness and good will of their users. If anything good has come of the SARS scare, it is a renewed commitment to those ideals. How far they’ll take us is still anyone’s guess.

<a href=www.indianexpress.com>www.indianexpress.com Thomas H. Maugh Ii & Usha Lee Mcfarling

Toronto, April 25: In an effort to stave off economic disaster, Canadian officials launched a campaign Thursday to repudiate the World Health Organization’s warning that it is potentially dangerous to travel to Canada’s largest city because of an outbreak of SARS.

Local officials met Thursday morning to plot strategies to restore tourism in this normally bustling city, dispatching Canadian diplomats to WHO headquarters in Geneva to plead for the warning to be rescinded. ‘‘Fortress Toronto’’ and ‘‘Boo WHO’’ read banner headlines on local newspapers, as the mayor and other officials made high-profile public appearances to dispel what they considered misguided perceptions about the city, the sixth largest in North America and the financial capital of Canada.

Toronto officials argued that, despite the WHO warning, they were making major progress in controlling Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Dr Sheela Basrur, the city’s chief medical officer, said that Toronto had not had a new case for seven days.

WHO’s warning against unnecessary travel, issued Wednesday, was quickly echoed by the governments of Britain, France, Ireland, Australia, Venezuela and Jamaica.

Local hotels, convention centres and theatres were already beginning to feel the effects of cancelled reservations. The US is by far the largest source of foreign visitors to Canada, with more than 62 million border crossings each year.

Some good news came from the nearby Nova Scotia, which has issued a similar warning, then withdrew it overnight.

Toronto officials feel a strong sense of outrage. ‘‘They (WHO) have quarantined an entire city,’’ said Mayor Mel Lastman. ‘‘I demand that WHO come to Toronto and see for themselves that Toronto is safe to visit, safe to work in, and safe to play in.’’

Masks are rarely sighted on Toronto streets. Bus and subway drivers have been ordered not to wear masks, even though some reportedly would like to do so.

There have been no cases of infection on public transportation, officials said, so there is no need for the masks.

The Canadian government’s effort to rescind the WHO travel warning will probably do no good. The warning will remain in force for a full three weeks, WHO spokesman Jon Linden said Thursday. (LAT-WP)

Breaking News Posted on Thu, Apr. 24, 2003 TOM COHEN Sun-Herald.com-Associated Press

TORONTO -Canada's largest city staggered Thursday under a health alert warning people to stay away because of the SARS outbreak, leaving shops mostly empty, more conventions canceled and growing fear of long-term economic damage.

The federal government asked the World Health Organization to rescind its call for people to avoid Toronto because of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome that has killed 16 people, while Ontario province and city officials began planning for the economic impact.

"It is a mystery to us how they came to the conclusion they did," said Dr. Paul Gully of the federal health agency, which appealed to WHO to reverse its decision.

Gully said that seemed unlikely, but he also indicated Canada would tighten airport screening of passengers.

Britain, France, Ireland, Venezuela, Australia and Jamaica already have issued warnings similar to the WHO advisory, and the impact was immediate. But the United States has not taken such steps.

At the downtown Eaton Center, amid gleaming skyscrapers a few blocks from the Lake Ontario waterfront, merchants said business was down, particularly among American tourists who normally fill the shops.

"Usually it's quite busy throughout the day with lots of people milling around looking at things. Today and yesterday, there's nothing," said Charles McLachlan, manager of the Compucenter software store. "The city has basically emptied out."

While no one wears masks on the downtown streets, McLachlan noted a few customers these days want their change placed on the counter instead of in the hand.

"I'm not overly concerned," said Christy Cummings, one of Toronto's more than 3 million residents, who was shopping with her 3-year-old son. "I've been washing my hands more, and my son's, but we're still taking the subways and doing what we normally do."

Since SARS first appeared in Toronto from Asia just over a month ago, the city's 400,000-strong Chinese community - the biggest in North America - has been hardest-hit, with restaurants and shopping malls reporting business down 70 percent.

Now the city's robust convention industry, already hurt with two major medical conferences canceled in recent weeks, is taking more hits.

The Independent Educational Consultants Association of Fairfax, Va., moved its annual meeting of more than 600 people to Orlando, Fla., executive director Mark Sklarow said Thursday.

Planned for five years, it was to have been the group's first meeting outside the United States, and Sklarow said he wasn't sure about getting out of the contract with Toronto's Fairmont Royal York Hotel or the $20,000 in theater tickets purchased.

He called the WHO advisory "ridiculous," but said there was no choice but to cancel because his group had advised its members to rely on WHO and other health authorities on whether to attend.

Canadian Health Minister Anne McLellan spoke Thursday to WHO head Gro Harlem Brundtland about the travel advisory, saying the two agreed to increased discussion among experts about the situation.

Ontario Premier Ernie Eves called for an immediate reversal. The actions of the WHO are wrong and they are irresponsible," Eves said. "The decision is not based on scientific fact."

By including Toronto on the list of SARS hot zones - joining Hong Kong, Beijing, and the Chinese provinces of Guangdong and Shanxi - the WHO fueled a perception that an epidemic exists here.

Canadian experts deny that, noting the 330 probable and suspected cases is far lower than in China and Hong Kong. They also point out that 132 of the estimated 260 suspected cases have been released from hospitals.

They reiterated that their containment strategy of isolating known cases and tracking all possible exposures was working, but the message has failed to resonate.

Jim Flaherty, the Ontario enterprise minister, predicted "serious economic harm in the hotel and convention business," a mainstay of the Toronto economy. "There's concern with respect to the summer season," he said.

The Toronto City Council held an emergency meeting on the situation Thursday, with Mayor Mel Lastman depicting a grim situation.

"The businesses are hurting, they're hurting bad," he said. "People's lives are being adversely affected by both the disease and public perception of this crisis."

He said he would ask banks to allow deferred payments on loans and mortgages, after previously asking businesses to try to keep employees on their payrolls.

"I don't want to see SARS cost anyone their jobs, their homes, or their businesses," Lastman said.

It's too late for some in the tourism industry, said Paul Clifford, president of a local hotel and restaurant union. Hundreds of bell boys, cleaning staff, waiters and others already have been laid off, he said.

David Dodge, governor of the Bank of Canada, predicted the drop in travelers will hurt the national economy, with Toronto accounting for about a fifth of the total economic activity.

While major sports events prior to the WHO warning Wednesday have been well-attended, the Toronto Blue Jays say group sales are down for an upcoming homestand that begins Friday night against the Kansas City Royals.

"We've lost in excess of 5,000, close to 10,000 in group sales," said Paul Godfrey, the club's president and chief executive officer. "And that doesn't count people holding back who have second thoughts. We can tell walkups are down 500 to 1,000 a game."

Major League Baseball officials advised caution when players visit Toronto, telling teams to avoid crowds, hospitals and public transportation. And if they want to sign autographs, they ought to use their own pens, said Dr. Elliot Pellman, the league's medical adviser.

Concerns about the disease also prompted a religious order to tell hundreds of Toronto-area pilgrims to stay away from an annual outdoor Mass scheduled for Sunday. The Marian Fathers had been expecting more than 450 people from around Toronto for its special Mass at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Massachusetts. The ceremony draws more than 20,000 people.

Any arriving at the Sunday Mass "would be requested to leave," said Marians spokeswoman Kathleen Ervin.

Taipei Times-BLOOMBERG Thursday, Apr 24, 2003,Page 12

SARS FIASCO: The financial crisis caused by the viral outbreak will be alleviated by loan guarantees to protect jobs and will help small, struggling businesses survive

Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa plans an HK$11.8 billion (US$1.5 billion) package of spending and tax rebates to bail out companies after a deadly virus slashed consumer spending and tourist arrivals.

The plan, announced by Tung at a press briefing, includes waivers for property, sewage and water charges, plus loan guarantees to protect half a million jobs in the tourism, entertainment, retailing and catering industries. The government will rebate HK$2.3 billion of salaries tax to encourage spending.

Like similar steps taken by Singapore a week ago, the measures aim to help small businesses and companies such as Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, hotelier Shangri-La Asia Ltd and fast-food chain Cafe de Coral Holdings Ltd. People are staying home to avoid exposure to severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which has infected 1,458 people and killed 105 in the city in two months.

"It's already too late, the damage is already being done," said John Koh, a fund manager at Daiwa Asset Management Ltd, which runs US$200 million in Asia.

"How many companies are still around to apply for these benefits?" he said.

Tommy Cheung, a Legislative Council member representing the catering industry, said more than 100 restaurants have shut since the outbreak of the disease. The number of tourists visiting Hong Kong plunged by a third between mid-March and mid-April from a year earlier.

The Hang Seng Index fell 52.31, or 0.6 percent, to 8519.60, the lowest since Oct. 9, 1998, at the 4 pm market close. The index dropped 8.6 percent so far this year, the world's fourth worst-performing benchmark index behind those of India, Japan and Venezuela.

Tung has been criticized by opposition lawmakers for responding too slowly to the outbreak. China's leaders, who control the selection process that put Tung into his job, are questioning local politicians behind the scenes about his leadership abilities, the South China Morning Post reported.

Tung said he needed to balance the needs of business with the government's goal of reducing its deficit, forecast to be HK$68 billion in the year that began April 1.

"The measures seek to relieve the short-term impact of atypical pneumonia on our economy," Tung told a press briefing.

"They have also taken into account the medium-term need to make sure our budget is in balance," he said.

SARS has caught Hong Kong as the city was rebounding from its second recession in five years. The government said it will cut its previous 3 percent economic growth forecast for this year.

Hong Kong's budget deficit will be wider and growth will be slower this year because of SARS, Financial Secretary Antony Leung (±Á¿A™Q) told reporters. He said the government still expects to balance its budget in the year ended April 2007.

Some investors said reviving growth should be the government's priority.

"A one-off package is a good idea," said Andrew Salton, who helps manage $2.5 billion at Standard Life Investments Ltd.

"I wouldn't be concerned about the impact on the deficit," he said.

Under the government's plan, commercial rents in public housing estates will be reduced by as much as half for three months. Rates, water and sewage charges will be waived for up to four months for everyone, and license fees for the worst-affected industries will be scrapped for a year. Residents will each receive up to HK$3,000 via salaries tax rebates.

In the hotel and leisure industries, which have been worst-affected by the outbreak of the disease, the city will provide HK$3.5 billion in loans to pay salaries and protect jobs. The government also plans to create 21,500 temporary jobs and waive license fees for the transportation sector for a year.

Reuters Health Last Updated: 2003-04-07 10:00:54 -0400 (Reuters Health) By Tan Ee Lyn

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A WHO expert said on Monday the course of the deadly respiratory disease SARS appeared to be slowing at its source in southern China, while Hong Kong reported a spate of new cases of the mystery virus that has caused a global health scare.

Two more people died in Singapore of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), state media said on Monday, days after the city-state showed signs of success of subduing the virus that has killed at least 90 people worldwide and infected more than 2,600.

The Hong Kong government said on Monday SARS had infected 41 more people, bringing the total number of cases to 883, and hospitals were bracing for a possible tripling of cases.

The respiratory disease, which originated in China's Guangdong province, hit neighboring Hong Kong in March and has been spread around the world by air travelers.

Robert Breiman, head of a World Health Organization team investigating the outbreak in Guangdong, said on Monday the number of SARS cases was slowing in the province and the virus was showing signs it might be weakening.

"It does look like the disease rates are dropping -- dropping quite a bit," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"The problem isn't extinguished, which would be the nice place to get to. But it's occurring in lower frequency, lower incidence than it was during the peak time in February," he said.

"We're still not ruling out the possibility that the virus itself could become burned out and become less and less transmittable," Breiman said.

Some experts have suggested the SARS virus came from animals and mutated, then jumped to humans, but the team in Guangdong saw no evidence supporting that theory, he said.

SCHOOLS CLOSED

The deadly virus has spread to nearly 20 countries, slashing tourism, canceling events, closing schools and prompting economists to trim growth forecasts for parts of Asia.

Australia added SARS on Monday to a list of diseases requiring quarantine, ranking it as dangerous as cholera and smallpox.

The virus has skirted Europe but Belgium's health ministry said on Monday it was looking into a possible case of SARS after a 56-year-old woman was hospitalized with symptoms of the disease in the port city of Antwerp over the weekend.

Hong Kong Hospital Authority chairman Leong Che-hung, speaking of a worst-case scenario, told local television late on Sunday that health officials were preparing for up to 3,000 cases. He believed there would be sufficient manpower and facilities although intensive care units would be under pressure. Singapore, where eight people have died and which has the world's fourth-highest number of cases, is battling to control SARS from spreading in the city-state's main hospital.

A doctor at Singapore General Hospital was confirmed to be infected, raising fears of a crack in the government's strategy of isolating infected people. Twenty nurses at the hospital are also suspected of having SARS and have been isolated.

The fresh outbreak came after the government imposed strict control measures, placing more than 1,000 under home quarantine and closing schools.

PM'S TRIP CANCELED

Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong canceled a trip to China over the SARS scare, but went ahead with a visit to India, where a health official said the Singapore delegation would be subjected to a health screening, though not Goh himself.

Goh told Singaporeans to learn to live with the virus, because it would not disappear soon.

"What we are saying is this is not the end of the world, there's life. With terrorism, with the Iraqi war, with SARS, we are going to live as near normal a life as possible," he told a news conference.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, whose government is grappling with its first big crisis since taking office in March, said China could control the spread of SARS and welcomed visitors.

Few are likely to heed the assurance. Some foreign health experts in Beijing believe cases there have gone unreported.

The WHO team has been talking to early survivors of the illness trying to find how, or if, the virus -- new to science and possibly belonging to a family of viruses that cause the common cold -- made the leap from animals, possibly domesticated pigs and ducks.

SARS symptoms include high fever, chills and breathing difficulties, and the disease has a mortality rate of about 4 percent, roughly the same as measles. By comparison, tens of thousands die every year in the United States from various strains of influenza.

The WHO's Breiman balked at suggestions the outbreak was under control, as the Chinese government has said publicly on several occasions.

"I think that term 'under control' keeps getting people into various kinds of trouble. To me, that's not so much the issue as whether or not people are taking all the appropriate steps that are available to us at the moment," he said.

Breiman said the team would head back to Beijing on Tuesday pleased with its work in Guangdong, but had not solved the puzzle of how the disease originated and became an epidemic.

"I don't think that we, ourselves, during this time will have the answers. Of course, we didn't really expect that we would. It's too big of a set of questions and it's the people that have the data themselves that have to come up with the answers."

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