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Avoid Toronto, Beijing: WHO

Reuters

A family kept in quarantine for suspected affliction of SARS watching a television report on them in Pune on Wednesday.

LONDON April 23. Travellers should avoid Toronto, Beijing and China's Shanxi province because of the danger of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the World Health Organisation said today.

In the global health agency's latest move to stem the spread of the virus worldwide, the three locations joined Hong Kong and the Chinese province of Guangdong as "no-go areas" for visitors.

"Today, we are recommending that people who have unnecessary travel to Shanxi, Beijing and Toronto postpone that travel if possible because, as was the case for Hong Kong and Guangdong, these areas now have quite a high magnitude of disease, a great risk of transmission locally — outside of the usual health workers — and also they have been exporting cases to other countries," said Dr. David Heymann, WHO's communicable diseases chief. The travel warning will be active for at least three weeks.

The Maharashtra Health Minister, Digvijay Khanvilkar, told reporters in New Delhi that the three confirmed SARS patients from Pune, all members of a family, were being treated in isolation at a government hospital and were recovering fast.

Blood samples of a suspected case in Nashik had been sent to the National Institute of Virology.

The first suspected SARS case in Punjab was reported from Bhatinda today. Fortynine-year-old Jagdish Rai was admitted to the civil hospital after he complained of breathlessness.

PTI, UNI

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