TAIPEI, May 20: Taiwan recorded its largest single day rise in SARS deaths and new cases on Tuesday as the crisis in the island’s hospitals worsened, while China said most of the country was close to controlling the epidemic.

As the World Health Organisation began a second day of its annual assembly in Geneva focused mainly on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, most of the major outbreaks of the disease appear to be easing.

Hong Kong is reporting just a handful of cases daily, Singapore has recorded just one new case in 20 days and, despite some scepticism, the number of new cases in China has plummeted from some 200 a day to just 17 Tuesday.

The exception is Taiwan where 39 new cases of the illness were reported, bringing the total number of cases to 383. Another 12 deaths were recorded from the disease, bringing the death toll on the island to 52.

Over 90 percent of infections have been recorded at hospitals where scores of staff have quit their jobs in protest at the lack of proper protection and seven hospitals have been forced to shut down some services.

The Taipei Municipal Hoping Hospital and Jen Chi Hospital were shut down completely in April, and sacked Hoping superintendent Wu Kang-wen made a tearful public apology Tuesday for the mass infection that broke out at his establishment.

The authorities in Taiwan have been criticised for their lax handling of quarantine measures aimed at stemming the spread of the new virus, for which there is still no cure, vaccine or diagnostic test.

The illness first emerged in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in November, and nearly 90 percent of the estimated 8,000 cases of SARS worldwide have been recorded in mainland China and Hong Kong.

Chinese officials said the epidemic had been brought under control in most affected areas of the vast country.

In Beijing, the worst affected city in the world with nearly 2,500 cases, officials said the dramatic drop in the number of cases showed quarantine and control measures were working.

“This is what we have wanted to see for a long time, a fall from double-digit to single-digit numbers,” said Liang Wannian, deputy director of Beijing’s public health bureau.

China has now reported 294 SARS deaths from 5,253 infections since it responded to condemnation from around the world on April 20 over its attempts to cover up the scale of the health crisis.—AFP