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China under pressure to come clean on SARS

AFP, Hong Kong
China was facing pressure Thursday to reveal the full extent of its SARS epidemic as scientists hailed early progress towards finding a cure for the killer pneumonia.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has asked China to urgently improve the way its reports new cases of atypical pneumonia, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, after revelations that many cases of the illness were not appearing in official statistics.
The WHO said Wednesday that in Beijing alone the number of cases may be five times higher than reported, indicating China's official toll of 1,457 cases and 65 deaths may be a large underestimation.
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 two months killing 161 people and infecting over 3,000 people in some 25 countries.
An editorial in the Asian Wall Street Journal said it was vital the Chinese leadership took bold action to confront the scale of the crisis, which is having a devastating economic effect on the whole of Asia.
"Beijing's poor crisis management has not only cost lives and profits, it has shattered faith at home and abroad that a small group of authoritarian but pragmatic leaders could steer the country smoothly along a course of modernization and globalization," said the paper.
But despite the WHO revelations, China's state-controlled media made no mention Thursday of the new Beijing cases and continued with a news blackout about the spread of the virus.
And data provided by China's health ministry to the WHO Thursday revealed
just 12 new cases. However it included the first ever case in the remote northern Ningxia Autonomous region indicating the illness is continuing to spread across the vast country.
As the illness claims new victims around the world -- with fresh suspect cases reported in Canada (seven), Malaysia (one) and South Korea (four) -researchers have warned a cure could be far away despite a breakthrough in identifying the virus.
Researchers from 13 different laboratories around the world pinpointed the coronavirus -- a virus family which causes the common cold -- as the cause of SARS.
The confirmation would allow for the refinement of diagnostic tests and steer a clear path to fight the disease, although a WHO researcher in Geneva said it would take "months to years" to develop a full treatment.