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SARS spread: Singapore to punish violators

By P. S. Suryanarayana

SINGAPORE April 25. Singapore today led the battle against the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in East Asia by adopting a drastic new legislation to punish those who might break the home-quarantine orders or expose the community to the infection by other means of willful action or sheer neglect.

The law, an expansion of the scope of the Infectious Diseases Act, provides for exorbitant fines and/or jail terms. The enactment, carried out at a session of Parliament here today, flows from the concerns of the Singapore authorities over the continued prevalence of this new disease as a potential danger to society at large despite the steps already taken in recent weeks. Given a sense of fear-psychosis among some sections of Singaporeans, the authorities here have repeatedly assured the public that there is nothing amiss about a particular hospital that has been designated for the diagnosis of the SARS symptoms and the treatment.

The anxieties of the people on this score were set off by the indications that the SARS transmissions initially occurred in hospitals themselves in Singapore. Today's legislation was enacted through a fast-track approach by using a Certificate of Urgency under the relevant rules. Elsewhere in the region, Thailand's Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who would host a special summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations on the SARS question in Bangkok next week, indicated today that the participant-leaders would not be subjected to any SARS-detection tests.

In China, the authorities `quarantined' three hospitals and reassured the public that "people's lives are more important than economic growth''. Steps were also announced to build a disease control network this year at a cost of over $420 millions.

The total number of SARS cases in China was today put at 2,601. The death toll in mainland China as also the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was 115 each.

The Indian Defence Minister is now in Shanghai on the final leg of his China tour which, too, has served as a political gesture of goodwill in the SARS context in China.

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