Beijing deploys SARS patrols, Motorola shuts site

Beijing - The worst-hit district of China's capital sent thousands of investigators on a hunt for SARS on Tuesday and Motorola closed its China headquarters in the city because a staff member there caught the disease.

The army of SARS investigators was the latest manifestation of China's desperate fight against the sometimes fatal disease which triggered another riot by villagers furious that people from infected areas had been put among them.

But Premier Wen Jiabao said the country's plight remained "grave" despite stepped-up prevention, detection and treatment of the disease which has struck hardest in Beijing, where almost 1,900 cases have now been confirmed.

"Beijing has made progress in the fight against Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, but the situation still remains grave," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Wen as saying.

"A great deal of arduous work has to be done to bring the epidemic under control at an early date," Wen added.

China's Health Ministry announced 138 new cases of SARS on Tuesday. It also reported eight more deaths, taking the toll in the world's most populous and worst-hit nation to 214.

In Haidian, the Beijing district with more SARS cases than any other, some 30,000 investigators in 4,000 teams made rolling inspections of businesses, neighborhoods and work sites, district official Zhou Liangluo told reporters.

Twenty patrols have the job of making continuous examinations of the many construction sites in the district, China's high-technology hub where many uninsured migrant laborers work.

"For those who do not meet proper standards (news - web sites), they are put into overhaul and we'll suspend their operations," said Zhou, who took no questions and did not go into detail.

Each household in the district of about 2.2 million people had been given a thermometer and emergency contact numbers and all offices and businesses had to install temperature monitoring systems, he said.

The flu-like disease has infected 4,409 people in China. Nationwide, 107 of the 214 deaths have been in Beijing. Nearly 7,000 people have been infected worldwide.

Hong Kong said on Tuesday the virus had killed six more people and infected a further nine. The death toll there is 193.

Elsewhere, there were signs the epidemic which has caused widespread panic and hurt the travel industry severely was slowly coming under control.

Singapore reported its first case in three days as its death toll rose to 27 and the tourism board said a damaging drop in visitor arrivals due to SARS had probably bottomed out after a record plunge of 67 percent in April from a year earlier.

The Philippines reported seven more cases, taking its total to 10, but said they were all on their way to recovery.

In China, especially in Beijing, the news got gloomier.

Motorola, the world's second biggest mobile phone maker and one of the biggest foreign investors in China, closed its Beijing headquarters after an employee came down with SARS.

It told about 1,000 employees to work from home until next Monday after 27 workers had close contact with the infected employee, spokeswoman Mary Lamb told Reuters.

Other foreign firms have closed offices or pulled employees out of China, reflecting a fear of the little-understood disease and, in some cases, lack of confidence in China's ability to control the outbreak.

Villagers in coastal Zhejiang province, 930 miles south of Beijing, reacted in fear.

About 1,000 people in Gucheng rioted from Saturday to Monday demanding that people from SARS-infected areas now quarantined near their homes be moved, local people said.

There were several injuries when the angry villagers blocked and overturned a car as it tried to enter a former government compound where people were under quarantine, a pharmacist said.

Six people had been quarantined in one building on the first day of the riot, she said. "The villagers broke the windows of the other two buildings," she added.

"The quarantine has been closed down and people there all left this morning. Those who were quarantined went home."

Late last month, a riot broke out in a town near Beijing after its people learned of a plan to use an abandoned school to quarantine people suspected of having SARS.

In Beijing, a city of 14 million people, 16,436 had been quarantined, Xinhua said.

But officials in the eastern city of Nanjing denied reports that 10,000 people had been quarantined there.

"No, no, no, that is not true," one city official told Reuters. "So far, we haven't finished compiling the statistics for quarantined people."

Only one person had caught SARS in the city and another seven were suspected of having it, he said. -- Associated Press

Brudirect.com News