China steps up Sars curbs

There is just one confirmed case in the city

China has quarantined 10,000 people in the eastern city of Nanjing in a bid to contain the Sars outbreak which has claimed 214 lives in the country and infected 4,409 people.

Eight deaths and 138 new cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome were announced on Tuesday.

Four of the new deaths announced on Tuesday were in Beijing, where 563 more people were isolated, bringing the official total number of quarantined to more than 16,000.

The authorities are enforcing the quarantine rigorously.

Police sealed off the home town of three suspected carriers who escaped from the capital, ringing the area with road blocks in order to arrest the fugitives and anyone accompanying them.

The fact that so many people have been quarantined in Nanjing, where there has been just one confirmed case of Sars, is also seen as an indication of just how far the authorities are prepared to go to suppress the disease.

SARS WORLDWIDE

Known death tolls:

World: 812

Mainland China: 348

Hong Kong: 298

Taiwan: 84

Singapore: 32

Canada: 38

Source: WHO/local authorities

Global update

Meanwhile the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Gro Harlem Brundtland, has warned that the outbreak has yet to peak in China.

"There are still a considerable number of cases every day and in a number of provinces," she told European Union health ministers in Brussels.

Riots

Riots have also been reported in rural parts of China where villagers apparently attacked buildings they learned were to be used as quarantine centres.

The violence in Henan province happened last week, but news of it has only leaked out now.

It would be at least the third attack on a quarantine facility in the last two weeks, with ignorance and fear of Sars making for a volatile cocktail, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports.

Beijing feels like a city under quarantine

In Beijing, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said some progress had been made but warned the situation remained grave.

China's state press reported on Tuesday that none of more than 1,400 patients who recovered from Sars had suffered a relapse.

The entire 13-million population of Beijing is under a form of unofficial isolation, with roads out of the city blocked and flights cancelled.

In other developments:

• Colombia's Deputy Health Minister Juan Gonzalo Lopez said the first probable case of Sars in the country had been detected - an indication that the disease may be spreading to new areas

• Kazakhstan closes its border with China and plans to evacuate its citizens from China until the outbreak is controlled

• In Mozambique, a top official of the governing party and five aides have been put into quarantine as a precaution against the virus, after arriving from a visit to China

• The University of California at Berkeley bans new admissions for summer classes from several Asian countries hit by Sars, the first major American educational institution to do so

Turning the corner

Quarantine has also been imposed on a hotel in the Russian Far East after the emergence of a possible Sars case. Local radio reports that six Chinese nationals escaped from the hotel and are being sought.

But in other countries it looks like the battle against Sars is starting to be won.

Hong Kong reported six deaths on Tuesday compared to three on Monday, the lowest single-day death toll since 12 April.

In Taiwan two more people have died and a 27th victim died in Singapore.

But in Canada just one suspected case was reported on Sunday, fuelling the idea that the disease had been brought under control there.