WHO recommends SARS screening at airports

The World Health Organisation has recommended that countries most affected by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) screen…

The World Health Organisation has recommended that countries most affected by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) screen international passengers at airports.

"We are now at the stage where we are going to step up ourrecommendations with regard to travel," WHO's Mr Max Hardiman said.

The Hong Kong government said today it is ordering more than 1,000 people who may have been exposed SARS into quarantine.

Hong Kong's government leader, Mr Tung Chee-hwa, said officials are ordering the quarantine of 1,080 people believed to have been in close contact with SARS victims.

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They are being asked to stay home and must check in regularly with health officials over the next 10 days or they could be fined or jailed.

The quarantine affects those who have visited SARS victims in hospitals or people who recently spent time on the ninth floor of Hong Kong's Metropole Hotel, where an infected mainland Chinese medical professor passed the disease to seven other people and started a global outbreak.

The territory's schools, except for universities, will be closed from Saturday to April 6th to try and halt the spread, which has killed 10 people in Hong Kong.

In Singapore, about 600,000 children went on aforced vacation today after schools were shut down tocontain SARS, which has killed two people in the country. Another 60 patients are still hospitalised, 11 of them in "serious conditions".

Russia has also stepped up controls on air flights from southeast Asia and Europe to prevent passengers from spreading SARS.

Airline attendants have been alerted to the problem and passengers believed to display symptoms of SARS may be placed in special isolation facilities, officials said.

SARS has killed at least 53 people, mostly in Asia, and infected 1,300 others in more than a dozen countries.

PA