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China deploys cadres to check disease

Beijing May 7. China deployed communist party cadres and investigators to monitor the spread of SARS while WHO decided to send a team to a province surrounding Beijing to prevent a rural outbreak of the epidemic as the countrywide toll rose to 219 with five deaths and 159 new cases today.

In a desperate bid to check the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome 30,000 investigators were deployed in Haidian district of Beijing to check businesses and residences to look for patients and ensure that measures are being taken to improve hygiene, district official, Zhou Liangluo said.

Each household in the district of 2.2 million people has been issued a thermometer and emergency contact numbers, while offices and businesses were directed to install temperature- monitoring systems.

Reports that migrant workers had ignored government calls and travelled to their rural homes raised concerns over the disease spreading to the hinterland.

``All entry and exit points in rural Beijing are now controlled by cadres who have been assigned the task by the ruling Communist party,'' Cai Fuchao, the director of publicity department of Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China said.

Meanwhile, the World Health Organisation said on Wednesday it will send experts to China's northern province of Hebei to investigate a spreading SARS outbreak, while Premier, Wen Jiabao, called for urgent efforts to stop the disease in poor rural areas.

The reports came amid growing worries that severe acute respiratory syndrome, still largely an urban disease in China, might be spreading into the countryside.

— AP, PTI

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