China predicts 'victory' over SARS

China perennially rejects Taiwan’s observer status at WHO, let alone its membership, arguing it would imply the island has sovereignty, which Beijing rejects, saying Taiwan is a territory of China.

WHO epidemiologists could have helped Taiwan during the early days of its SARS outbreak in March but stayed away until China relented in early May and allowed a visit.

Now, Taiwan is the only place with an accelerating outbreak of severe acute respiratory disease. It reported its second record increase in cases in as many days on yesterday, with 36 new cases.

Meanwhile, China reported its lowest daily increase in deaths – two.

“We are convinced that atypical pneumonia is a disease which may be prevented, which may be controlled, which may be cured,” China’s President Hu Jintao said, according to Russia’s Interfax news agency. He added that much still needed to be done.

World-wide the death toll stood today at 634, out of the more than 7,700 people who have been infected – mostly in Asia – since the disease first surfaced in southern China in November.

WHO said over the weekend that most of the world’s outbreaks of the disease are subsiding thanks in large part to strict isolation of patients in affected areas.

WHO has set a period of 20 days without a new case – or twice the disease’s incubation period – as the standard for declaring a country’s outbreak contained.

Singapore’s hopes of WHO declaring its outbreak under control on yesterday were dashed when the city-state reported an 11th-hour new case – its first in 20 days. The health minister said the new case was a Malaysian man residing in Singapore who began to run a fever on May 5.

Officials in Japan’s second-largest city, Osaka, met for emergency talks yesterday after it emerged that an infected Taiwanese doctor had holidayed there earlier this month.

Taiwan’s new health minister – the previous one resigned on Friday to take responsibility for the island’s spiralling crisis – tried to ease the outrage by saying he did not think the doctor knew he was infected when he travelled.

Health minister Chen Chien-jen said more restrictions would be placed on the travel of doctors who have treated SARS patients.

“Many of our medical workers have worked extremely hard these days and there is nothing wrong with having some rest and entertainment,” Chen said. “But if possible, I hope they will not travel abroad at this time ... to avoid exporting the virus.”

The matter of Taiwan’s participation within WHO has in previous years been regarded as a political problem, with China insistently rejecting any participation. But the issue takes on special significance this year because of Taiwan’s SARS crisis and the early help the island could have received from WHO if it was represented there.

The US reaffirmed its support for Taiwan getting observer status.

“It’s good for all countries, small, large, developing and developed, to have as much information about this disease as quickly and currently as possible,” said US Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

“That’s what the observer status would give and that’s why it’s important for Taiwan to have it,” he told a small group of journalists.

In China, Hu said that the country is “improving the appropriate legal base, has created a rapid reaction system, is improving systems of warning and control” in its fight against SARS.

Additionally, a special fund has been created to provide free treatment for the sick in China’s poor, vast countryside, home to most of the nation’s 1.3 billion people.

In the northern province of Hebei six people were sentenced to prison for inciting riots and using violence to block government efforts to stop the outbreak, state newspapers reported yesterday.