Fears for Taiwan As Sars Drops in Beijing

The east Asian Sars outbreak, which Chinese officials said showed signs of declining in Beijing, today appeared to be accelerating in Taiwan with the single largest daily increase in cases on the island.

It reported 18 new Sars cases, the most since the virus first struck there two months ago, and authorities fear the disease may have spread to the south of the island from the capital, Taipei.

Authorities in the southern Kaohsiung region are looking for a taxi driver who transported an elderly man who died in hospital this week. If confirmed as a Sars case, it would be the first death from the virus in southern Taiwan, officials said.

The leap in new cases on the island has brought its total to 149, and came a day after the World Health Organisation (WHO) advised against all but essential travel to Taipei.

It has also advised against travel to several areas of China, where officials fear that the so-far mainly urban disease might spread into rural regions, where the majority of China's 1.3bn people live amid a shortage of doctors and hospitals unable to cope with epidemics.

A senior official in Beijing said the number of new cases admitted to the city's hospitals has fallen from 70-80 a day last month, to 30-40 per day over the past week.

In an apparent sign of confidence in the battle against the disease, it was announced that college entrance tests for more than 80,000 prospective students are to take place next month as scheduled.

City officials may have feared that cancelling the tests would provoke too much frustration in the city, following tough anti-Sars measures that have closed cinemas, gyms and other public facilities, and suspended classes at most universities.

"The upward tendency of Sars cases has been effectively checked in Beijing, and the epidemic shows signs of declining," Liang Wannian, deputy director general of the city health bureau, said at a news conference.

The capital has reported 112 deaths from the virus, half of mainland China's total, out of a total of 507 worldwide since it surfaced in China's southern Guangdong province in November.

Most theories have held that the virus recently jumped from animals to humans, leading to the initial outbreak, but a new study by scientists at Singapore's Genome Institute and published in the Lancet medical journal suggests the virus is surprisingly stable and not mutating significantly.

That could mean it has been around in humans longer than previously thought, since viruses mutate most when they first come into a new situations.

Another study published today, which analyses Singapore's nine-week-long Sars outbreak, shows that while women on the island outnumbered men in contracting Sars, more than half of those who died were men.

The study, prepared by the WHO and Singapore's health ministry, said that 66% of the island's probable Sars cases were women, but that 56% of the deaths were men. It did not however explain the higher death rate for men.