CHINA: Beijing was under pressure yesterday to reveal the full extent of its SARS epidemic as the virus claimed four more lives in Hong Kong and another in China.
Leaders in south-east Asia have called an emergency summit to combat the crisis.
As fears grew that Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was spreading across China, a first case was also confirmed in India.
New cases or suspect cases also emerged in Australia (3) Canada (7), China (16) Hong Kong (29), Kazakhstan (1), Malaysia (1), South Korea (4) and Taiwan (2). After the fatalities in Hong Kong and China, the global death toll rose to 166.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has made an urgent appeal to China to improve its reporting of SARS after revelations that many cases were not appearing in official statistics.
The WHO said on Wednesday that in Beijing alone the number of cases might be five times higher than reported, indicating China's official toll of 1,461 cases and 66 deaths could vastly underestimate the scale of the problem.
China yesterday defended its handling of the epidemic and said it was working to make the figures "accurate", even as state-controlled media continued a news blackout about SARS and made no mention of new cases.
Foreign ministry spokesman Mr Liu Jianchao said new figures would be released on Sunday and he suggested they would address some of the discrepancies in the accounting.
China is the region worst affected by the SARS virus, which first emerged in November in the southern province of Guangdong but has spread rapidly around the world in the past six weeks, infecting over 3,000 people in some 25 countries.
The communist authorities have been strongly criticised for trying to cover up the original outbreak and for continuing to hide the scale of the problem, even after promising the WHO full co-operation.
European External Relations Commissioner Mr Chris Patten, a former governor of Hong Kong, said the former British colony had been hammered by China's failure to share knowledge about the Guangdong outbreak sooner.
And he urged the Beijing government to come clean.
"I hope this will be the last occasion on which the international community will have to call for much greater transparency from China," Mr Patten said during a speech in Australia.
There is no vaccine, cure or conclusive diagnostic test for the illness, but US Secretary of Health Mr Tommy Thompson said a test to screen people for the virus should be available to scientists within 10 days.
The vast majority of SARS cases are in Asia. In addition to China and Hong Kong, deaths have also been recorded in Canada (13), Singapore (13), Vietnam (5), Thailand (2) and Malaysia (1).
The epidemic has caused huge disruption and economic losses across Asia since the WHO posted a global alert about the illness five weeks ago.
In particular, travel and tourism have slumped.
In a bid to contain the economic fallout and implement regionwide measures to contain the virus, 10 south-east Asian nations said they would hold a one-day summit in Bangkok on April 29th.