Beijing orders closure of entertainment venues

BEIJING -- China today shut down all theaters, cinemas and other places of entertainment in Beijing in an effort to curb the spread of SARS.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the length of the closures would depend on progress made in combatting severe acute respiratory syndrome, which has killed at least 42 people and sickened 988 in Beijing.

SARS has killed 122 people and sickened more than 2,700 across China.

Earlier Saturday, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang resigned amid criticism China's response to the outbreak was slow. Parliament assigned his duties to Vice Premier Wu Yi, the government said. Wu, China's highest-ranking woman, is a respected former trade envoy and already was the top official in charge of health care.

Stringent measures

The closures are the latest in a series of increasingly stringent measures by authorities to contain SARS in Beijing.

At least three of the city's hospitals have been sealed off due to SARS infections, and thousands of residents have been placed under quarantine, some at home and others in hospitals.

At a meeting in the Malaysian capital, health officials from across Asia came up with a joint plan to fight SARS with tighter screening of travelers.

"We must use every weapon at our disposal," the regional director of the World Health Organization, Shigeru Omi, told health ministers and senior officials from Southeast Asia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.

The health ministers approved a plan to boost screening at international departure points, bar travelers with SARS symptoms and require health forms for visitors from affected countries.

The worldwide spread of SARS has been blamed on travelers in Asia, particularly in Hong Kong and southern China, where the flu-like disease emerged last fall.

"Should SARS continue to spread, the global economic consequences could be great in a closely interconnected and interdependent world," Malaysian Health Minister Chua Jui Meng said.

Chua said the measures approved by the ministers would be presented to national leaders at a summit next week before being implemented formally.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong health officials reported 17 new cases of SARS infections Saturday, the lowest daily figure this month, but they said it was too early to know whether the disease was coming under control. For more than a week, the daily number of new cases had been between 20 and 30.

India reported its fifth case of SARS on Saturday, further raising fears the disease could spread swiftly among the country's more than 1 billion people, most of whom have inadequate health care.

Worldwide, SARS has killed more than 290 people and sickened more than 4,600. In the United States, there have been 41 cases but no deaths.

The World Health Organization confirmed Saturday it is reconsidering the travel warning it issued last week for Toronto, where SARS claimed a 20th Canadian victim on Saturday.

Toronto, Canada's largest city, is the epicenter of the biggest outbreak of SARS outside of Asia.

Saturday's meeting in Kuala Lumpur and next week's summit of Southeast Asian leaders in Thailand could determine the future course of how nations tackle SARS, said the WHO's Omi.

"The threat posed by SARS is unprecedented," Omi said. "The virus has already demonstrated its explosive power to cause sudden outbreaks in a large number of countries. Tourism has almost disappeared, normal life has been seriously disrupted."

China's Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu said the meeting underscored the need for Asian countries to be "united together as a team to fight the epidemic."

Elsewhere, the debate over how to treat the flu-like illness intensified. Medical experts from Singapore and Canada -- both with SARS outbreaks -- have questioned Hong Kong's use of a drug treatment.

Hong Kong says most SARS victims have shown good responses to a combination of the antiviral medicine ribavirin and steroids. But global health officials have doubts and doctors from Singapore and Canada said late Friday they have not seen good results from those drugs.

Dr. Arthur Chern, of Singapore's Health Ministry, said ribavirin does not alter the course of the disease and only some patients seem to benefit from steroids.

Speaking to the seminar by videoconference, Dr. Donald Low of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto questioned whether ribavirin might also be harming SARS patients and said he may stop administering the drug.

In Hong Kong, Health Director Dr. Margaret Chan declined to say whether the territory was winning its fight against SARS, in light of the lowest number of new cases since at least late March.

"We hope the trend will continue and move downward, but we are dealing with a new virus, a new disease," Chan said.