China Threatens Death to Anyone Spreading Sars Deliberately

China warned yesterday that anyone who deliberately spreads the Sars virus may face execution, and those who violate quarantine may be jailed for seven years.

The warning by the country's supreme court is based on a law defining a "threat to public safety" in the context of Sars as a crime.

Those who cause injury or death by spreading the virus, says the court's clarification, "may be sentenced to 10 years or above in detention, or may be detained indefinitely, or may be sentenced to death".

Other laws will be applied against medical officials failing to do their duty, people selling quack medicines for Sars or hiking the price of genuine medicines, and anyone masquerading as a doctor.

The Chinese mainland now claims to be close to controlling the virus.

The health ministry reported 53 new cases of infection yesterday, the lowest one-day increase since it admitted last month that it was facing a national crisis.

The news came as Britain's health protection agency announced that one of the UK's eight "probable" cases had been confirmed. The person, who is not being named, has recovered.

The global effort to halt the outbreak received a setback yesterday, however, when Taiwan reported 26 new cases - its biggest one-day increase - bringing its total to 264.

The entire staff and patients of the National Taiwan University hospital in Taipei have been quarantined.

Taiwan has now outstripped Canada and Singapore to register the world's third-worst outbreak, after the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong.

The World Health Organisation has removed Toronto from its list of Sars-affected areas, and Hong Kong continues to report only a handful of new cases each day.

Dr Hsu-mei Hsu, of Taiwan's centre for disease control, claimed that because Taiwan was not a member of the UN, the WHO was not providing sufficient help.

"The WHO are not allowed to provide information to us because of the political situation," he added.

Taiwan could get help from the WHO on technical matters as long as the organisation did not imply that the island was separate from China, a WHO spokesman said.

In China, authorities say that they have so far managed to largely prevent the spread of the virus beyond the cities.

In some rural areas, the local authorities have sent police and doctors to railway and bus stations to control the movement of possible Sars carriers from the cities. Thermal scan ners have been installed at some railway stations, the Beijing Daily reported yesterday, to check for passengers with the high temperature that was characteristic of Sars sufferers.

The latest figures from the countryside show that only 85 of China's 2,300 counties have reported cases.

WHO researchers are uncertain whether this means that the virus spreads more readily in urban areas, or whether the real incidence in the countryside has yet to emerge.