'China still holding back' - WHO

2003-06-03 08:41

Hong Kong - A senior World Health Organisation (WHO) official has criticised China's cooperation in the battle against Sars and said vital information is still being withheld, a report said on Tuesday.

Hitoshi Oshitani, who is leading the UN agency's battle against severe acute respiratory syndrome in Asia, also complained China was not sharing information with international researchers working to understand the mystery virus.

"The World Health Organisation is still in urgent need of information that we are just not getting from China," Oshitani told the International Herald Tribune from the WHO's Manila-based regional office.

"On a policy level things have changed in China, but that has not altered attitudes on an operational level," he said.

His comments came after China, which has recorded the most serious outbreak of Sars with more than 5 300 cases, on Monday reported no new cases of the illness for the first time since it began releasing figures on April 20.

The decision to start giving daily updates followed criticism of China's cover-up Sars which first emerged in the southern province of Guangdong in November. The WHO was only allowed access to China in April.

Despite the increased transparency, Oshitani said China was disclosing too little information about the number and background of cases, treatments and possible sources of the disease.

"We have good cooperation from Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada and even Vietnam," Oshitani said. "But we still don't get enough information about the outbreak in China."

He said the lack of information made it difficult to judge the accuracy of the dramatic fall in the number of infections China has reported in the past few weeks.

"A few weeks ago when they told us there were 50 new cases, we did not know how recent those cases were," Oshitani said. "That makes it difficult to know the exact stage of the outbreak."

However, Oshitani said he believed the number of new cases was falling in China and that the WHO was confident there were no major clusters.

He was also critical of China's failure to contribute to the global effort to beat the disease.

"Unlike Hong Kong and Singapore, China has not been working on the international collaborative studies or taking part so actively in collective lab research," Oshitani said.

"Although China is the world's greatest reservoir of information on Sars, they do not share their information."

He added: "I am sure they have collected a great deal of information about the disease that could be of immediate use to researchers."

- AFX