Straits Times: Beijing 'under-reporting cases'

WHO expert makes comment after China announces four new deaths and 39 new cases - its lowest daily increase in weeks

BEIJING - China yesterday announced its lowest nationwide daily increase in infections in weeks.

But a World Health Organisation (WHO) expert said Beijing hospitals were failing to record some possible Sars cases, leading to likely under-reporting of the size of the Chinese capital's outbreak.

The Health Ministry reported four new Sars deaths and 39 new cases - a fraction of the increase announced early this month when China was reporting more than 150 new cases a day.

Shanghai, the country's biggest city, reported its second death - a 54-year-old man who was not hospitalised until he was gravely ill and had infected his wife.

The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome has killed 275 people on the Chinese mainland and infected 5,191.

Beijing, the hardest-hit area in the world, reported one new death and 28 new cases. That raised its total reported cases to more than 2,400.

However, WHO expert Daniel Chin said city hospitals were not recording some patients who have Sars symptoms but had no known contact with an infected person and recovered quickly.

'In the last couple of days, we have become concerned that there actually is under-diagnosis of probable Sars cases in Beijing,' he said.

However, he said it did not appear that hospitals were trying to hide cases.

He had no estimate of the possible number of unreported cases but said it 'may not be that small'.

Chinese leaders have promised to report honestly on Sars and have threatened to punish officials who try to conceal cases.

'No individual or administration will be allowed to tamper with or delay the reporting of information,' the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Mr Wen as saying at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday.

He said anyone caught breaking disease control measures must be punished.

Xinhua said over 300 Communist Party and government officials have been fired or given other punishments for delaying the release of figures and other violations in the provinces of Hunan and Jiangsu.

On Thursday, state media publicised a warning by China's Supreme Court that those who cause death or severe illness by knowingly spreading Sars could face a prison term or possible execution.

The court said quarantine violators could be sentenced to up to seven years in prison.

Two school principals in the north-eastern city of Harbin were fired for holding entrance tests in defiance of orders to postpone them, the China Youth Daily reported.

In Jiangsu in China's east, a woman was sentenced to one year in a labour camp for leading an attack on an office building that was being converted into a Sars quarantine centre, Xinhua said. -- AP

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