China expands travel restriction to fight SARS

By William Foreman
Associated Press

BEIJING — China banned foreign tourists from visiting Tibet and placed new travel restrictions on Beijing's university students yesterday as the nation's leader tried to rouse the public into waging a "people's war" to stop SARS from spreading.

Taiwan, meanwhile, announced steps to control the spread of the ailment, which has so far struck 100 people. Lawmakers passed a law to jail those who knowingly infect others and set up a billion-dollar fund to tackle the disease.

Taiwan health officials, who said eight people on the island have died from SARS, announced that passengers on flights to Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore will have to wear surgical masks throughout the trips.

The new Chinese precautions were announced despite a rare bit of good news: Officials said the surge of SARS cases in Beijing appears to have leveled off and that the Chinese capital might start seeing a decline in the next 10 days.

Beijing official Liang Wannian said high case numbers "will continue for some time." But the situation "is stable and the upward trend has been effectively checked," said Liang, deputy director-general of the city's health bureau.

At least 91 people have died in Beijing and more than 1,600 are infected with the flu-like virus, called severe acute respiratory syndrome. Increases of more than 100 cases are reported almost daily. Throughout China, at least 181 have died and 3,799 have fallen ill.

Worldwide, the disease has claimed 391 lives, and more than 5,800 have been infected. In the United States, where no one has died and there are 54 cases, an Associated Press survey found that almost half of Americans think their country will face an epidemic similar to Asia's.

The United States and Britain were removed from the World Health Organization's list of "affected countries" Thursday because they have not had any local transmissions for 20 days.

An "affected area" is defined as a country where the virus has spread within local communities in the last 20 days, double the incubation period for severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Dr. David Heymann, the WHO's chief of communicable diseases, said that in the United States all the current cases of SARS were imported from other countries and those people have not spread it to anyone else locally in the past 20 days.

The same is true for Britain, and the reason that both countries were removed from the WHO's "affected area" list.

Vietnam, where the disease was first detected, was declared free of the SARS virus on Monday. The remaining countries on the "affected" list are Canada, China, Singapore and Mongolia.

And Hong Kong, Singapore and Toronto are "having a downslope in cases," Heymann said. "We believe those countries are adequately now protecting their health workers and others so that the disease is now being rapidly controlled.

"The big question, of course, still remains in China."

Chinese officials have said it would be catastrophic if SARS spread to China's vast countryside, where much of the population lives in poverty and lacks access to proper healthcare. Most rural hospitals wouldn't be able to handle a SARS outbreak, officials have said.

To stem the spread of SARS to the provinces, officials have been discouraging people from traveling.

Yesterday, the State Tourism Administration announced that foreign tourists wouldn't be allowed to visit the Himalayan territory of Tibet, which hasn't reported any SARS cases, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. The administration said that travelers would be banned from going to other western regions as well, the agency said.

Groups already in China were told to drop plans to go to those areas, Xinhua said. It did not say whether foreigners in Tibet would have to leave immediately.

The government also imposed new travel restrictions on Beijing university students. The rules require health checks for any who want to leave Beijing, and students are barred from rural and SARS-affected areas, said Cai Fuchao, a member the city's party committee.

Cai acknowledged that some students had fled the capital, but said there were only 39 SARS cases among Beijing's 670,000 university students.

The new restrictions came as President Hu Jintao called for the public to join in a "people's war" against SARS. The phrase echoes the guerrilla strategy declared by communist founder Mao Zedong before the 1949 revolution.

"The masses should be mobilized ... to wage a people's war against the epidemic," the Xinhua quoted Hu as saying.