A World Health Organisation official said today a new SARS patient in Taiwan appeared to be an isolated case.
"It seems at this stage this is an isolated case. It is confined to a lab," Mr Peter Cordingley, WHO's head of public information in the Western Pacific region, told Singapore state broadcaster Channel News Asia.
Taiwan health authorities said a 44-year-old senior scientist at a military hospital had tested positive for the lethal respiratory disease after possibly contracting it at the laboratory where he worked.
The case echoed that of a 27-year-old medical researcher in Singapore who caught Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in September while studying the virus at a government-run laboratory. He recovered and the case was considered isolated.
Mr Cordingley said there was no sign that the new Taiwan patient had infected anyone. "There is no evidence yet that it has spread into the community, just like the Singapore case didn't spread to the community," he said.
The man had started to run a fever - one of the first symptoms of SARS - hours after returning from Singapore, reviving fears of a winter resurgence of the disease.
SARS spread dramatically in the first half of the year, killing more than 800 people - mostly in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Canada - and causing chaos in many Asian economies.