BEIJING, April 20: The Chinese leadership took dramatic action on Sunday to end a cover-up of the SARS epidemic by revealing 14 new deaths and hundreds of cases, sacking two senior officials and cancelling May Day holidays.

The move followed international criticism of China’s handling of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

It also came as Hong Kong announced seven new deaths from the disease, which has now killed more than 200 worldwide.

Singapore, which has recorded 14 SARS deaths, meanwhile took the drastic step of ordering 2,400 people to quarantine themselves at home for 10 days because they might have come into contact with a SARS sufferer at a market.

In a statement Sunday the Chinese health ministry said there were 346 confirmed cases and 402 suspected cases in Beijing alone, and that 18 people had died from SARS in the capital.

The number of cases in Beijing is nine times higher than the previous offical figure of 44 cases and four deaths. The nationwide death toll from SARS has been raised to 79 with 1,814 confirmed cases of the illness.

Shortly after the statement state media reported that Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing mayor Meng Xuenong were removed from senior positions in the Communist Party, a formal step which will almost certainly see them fired from their government posts.

And in an attempt to prevent the further spread of the disease, the authorities cancelled the week-long May Day holidays when hundreds of millions of people journey across the vast country to visit relatives.

There is no cure, vaccine or diagnostic test for the illness, and China’s cooperation was seen as vital to containing and ultimately controlling the epidemic, which has devastated business and travel in Asia.

Vice Health Minister Gao Qiang — standing in for Zhang who failed to show up — told a press conference that a team had been sent to every hospital in Beijing to find out the real number of SARS cases.

However the new transparency only refers to Beijing, and the authorities gave no indication whether investigations were going on in other areas of China where SARS cases have been dribbling in day by day.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) welcomed China’s new attitude Sunday, but expressed concern that many poor and rural areas with only basic medical facilities were not facing the same scrutiny.

About 4,000 confirmed or suspected cases of SARS have now been recorded in around 30 countries, but the vast majority are in mainland China and the former British colony of Hong Kong, which is battling an alarming rise in deaths.

The Hong Kong government announced seven more deaths Sunday and 22 new cases. A total of 88 deaths and 1,380 cases have now been recorded in the territory.

The authorities do not include in their figures an American national who was pronounced dead on arrival at a Hong Kong hospital after being transferred from mainland China.

Governments continued Sunday their efforts to halt the disease’s spread.

Singapore — which has 178 cases — ordered 2,400 people who had been at a wholesale market to stay at home for 10 days, the incubation period of the virus, after a 45-year-old man was diagnosed with SARS. The market was temporarily shut down on Saturday.

In Hong Kong government officials joined the second day of a massive clean-up campaign to disinfect parks, commercial buildings, housing estates and polluted streets.

The new deaths have pushed the global toll from SARS to 204. In addition to China, Hong Kong and Singapore, deaths have been recorded in Canada (14), Vietnam (5), Thailand (2) and Malaysia (1).

Malaysia Sunday also announced a second possible SARS death, that of a 30-year-old man. Officials said tests would confirmed how he died in several days.

The WHO has pinpointed the coronavirus — a virus family which causes the common cold — as the cause of SARS, which begins with fever, a cough and shortness of breath.

But Canadian heath officials warned the coronavirus may not be the only cause of the disease.

“We have only identified the coronavirus in 50 percent of the people being treated for SARS,” health ministry spokesman Paul Gully told the Sunday edition of the Montreal newspaper La Presse.

The number of Canadians struck by the disease has continued to rise, with 304 people feared to be suffering from it, making health officials worried that they do not have SARS under control.

Health officials had until this week been able to trace virtually all the SARS cases in Canada back to one elderly woman who had infected some of those close to her after she contracted the disease on a trip to Hong Kong.

But unrelated cases have appeared in the past week, raising concern about the spread of the mysterious virus. —AFP