Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman is shown in an image from television during an interview with CNN on Thursday.
Associated Press
Health ministers from across east Asia came up with a joint plan to fight SARS during a meeting in Malaysia, as hundreds of medical workers in Beijing were forced to sleep in their offices because of hospital-wide quarantines.
Elsewhere, the debate over how to treat the flu-like illness intensified. Medical experts from Singapore and Canada — both hit hard by SARS outbreaks — have questioned Hong Kong's use of a cocktail drug treatment for the disease, and one expert wondered whether it might even be harming patients.
There have been 19 deaths in Canada, all in the Toronto area.
Meanwhile, Hong Kong health officials reported 17 new SARS cases on Saturday, the lowest daily figure this month, but they said it was too early to know whether the disease that has devastated Hong Kong was at last coming under control. India reported its fifth case of SARS on Saturday, further raising fears the disease could spread swiftly among the country's more than one billion people, most of whom have inadequate health care.
SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, has killed at least 293 people worldwide and infected more than 4,600.
Mainland China reported seven new SARS fatalities Saturday — six of them in Beijing — raising the mainland's death toll to 122. It also dismissed its health minister after criticism that he mishandled the SARS outbreak.
Hong Kong raised its death toll by five Saturday to 121 in total. Singapore reported one new death, bringing the city-state's toll to 20.
Meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Asian health ministers approved a plan to boost screening at international departure points, bar travellers with SARS symptoms and require health declaration forms for visitors from affected countries.
"We must use every weapon at our disposal," the regional director of the World Health Organization, Shigeru Omi, told the health ministers and senior officials from Southeast Asia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.
Medical experts met in Hong Kong for a two-day symposium on SARS. Hong Kong says most SARS victims have shown good responses to a combination of the antiviral medicine ribavirin and steroids. But global health officials have doubts and doctors from Singapore and Canada said late Friday they've not seen good results from those drugs.
Speaking to a seminar via a videoconference, Dr. Donald Low of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto questioned whether ribavirin might also be harming patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome, adding he may drop the drug.
Mr. Omi said Saturday's meeting in Kuala Lumpur and a summit next week of Southeast Asian leaders in Thailand could "determine the future course" of how nations tackle SARS.
China's Health Minister Zhang Wenkang, who had been stripped of his Communist party posts last weekend, was relieved of his duties as minister on Saturday. The government shakeup comes after President Hu Jintao and other senior leaders declared fighting SARS a top priority following mounting criticism at home and abroad of China's slow response.
Two hospitals in Beijing remained sealed off amid efforts to halt the spread of SARS. At the People's Hospital of Peking University, doctors were still treating non-SARS patients, said a nurse contacted there by phone. She said staff members sleep in their offices, and have food and water sent in from outside.
"I think it's the responsibility of a medical worker," the nurse, who wouldn't give her name, said Friday. "But our families are very worried and keep calling us every few hours."
