March 27, 2003	Thursday	Muharram 23, 1424

BEIJING, March 26: China said on Wednesday that 34 people had died of atypical pneumonia, suggesting the outbreak of the disease may be far more widespread than claimed previously.

A state-run newspaper reported 31 deaths in the southern province of Guangdong between November and late February, while the Beijing government said three had died in the capital during March.

The outbreak of the illness with flu-like symptoms in southern China is strongly suspected to be at the origin of the global epidemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) which has left at least 18 people dead.

Chinese authorities had said previously there had been five deaths from atypical pneumonia and 305 cases of the disease in Guangdong province.

But the Guangzhou Daily said 24 people had died of atypical pneumonia in the provincial capital Guangzhou and seven in a number of other cities in the province. It said the total number of cases in the province was 792.

A Guangzhou public health bureau official confirmed to AFP that 24 people had died in Guangzhou and a Guangzhou city government official said the report was the “most accurate.”

The Beijing municipal government issued a statement later Wednesday admitting that the mystery pneumonia had now also claimed its first victims in the capital.

“The Beijing public health department received eight patients of atypical pneumonia from Shanxi (province) and Hong Kong, among which three were in serious conditions and have died,” the statement said, adding that the other five patients have recovered.

It was the first admission by Beijing that the illness had affected areas outside Guangdong.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has sent a team of five experts to China but they have not been allowed to visit Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong, where 10 people have died of SARS and nearly 300 have been infected, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

WHO: People who catch Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the pneumonia disease that has broken out in parts of Southeast Asia, have a four-percent risk of dying from it, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.

“Ninety percent of people will recover after a short period of time, but 10 percent are ‘rapid progressors’, they get very sick very quickly and half of these people need assist devices to keep on breathing at some point,” the Geneva-based agency’s spokesman on communicable diseases, Dick Thompson, said.

“Around half of those people die. The (overall) mortality rate is around four percent,” he said.

SARS is the term coined by the WHO for a mysterious respiratory disease that, if press reports Wednesday are confirmed, has claimed around 50 lives and infected around 500 people. Most of the patients are in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and the adjoining territory of Hong Kong.

Leading medical laboratories around the world have teamed up in the race to identify the pathogen that causes SARS and determine its contagiousness and incubation period, the factors that are vital for defeating it.

Two unrelated viruses have been identified so far, isolated from samples sent back from patients.—AFP