China has isolated more than 600 people in Beijing as it races to sever a chain of SARS infection that leaked from a laboratory and could spread as tens of millions travel the country for the annual May Day holidays.
Four teams of World Health Organization (WHO) experts were due in China this week to help the government investigate the laboratory accident, to track down people exposed, control infection in hospitals and monitor the situation in the eastern province of Anhui, where one woman died from the disease.
The WHO lauded the widening quarantine, saying it showed the government was taking the right steps to check the spread of SARS before the week-long public holiday starting on May 1, when millions will travel.
"This is still not a significant public health threat," Beijing-based WHO spokesman Bob Dietz said.
"We still feel we know the initial source of infection and we've been able to follow closely the chain of transmission," he said.
All the cases diagnosed in the most recent outbreak -- two confirmed and six suspected -- were traceable to the laboratory.
The woman who died was the first SARS fatality since last year's epidemic that killed nearly 800 people worldwide.
In stark contrast to last year, when Beijing concealed the extent of the outbreak for weeks, the WHO had yet to receive any sign that cases were going undetected or unreported, Dietz said.
"We are not getting any other background noise," he said. "Last year at this time, journalists were coming to us, diplomats were coming to us, business people were coming to us."
In Taiwan, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday that a medical researcher surnamed Hung, who was running a fever when he arrived in Taiwan from Beijing on Saturday, was released from hospital on Monday. It said Hung would be required to perform personal health checks.
The CDC added that it will be working with the Mainland Affairs Council, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and customs officials to get a list of people who had traveled to and from China between March 25, the day China's first SARS patient began showing symptoms, and last Thursday, when border screening measures were put in place.
The CDC has taken throat-fluid samples from 145 travelers arriving in Taiwan last month and 393 this month and reported yesterday that no cases of SARS had been discovered.
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