Beijing is devising a contingency plan to restrict the possible resurgence of the SARS virus in winter, the city's senior health official said yesterday.

Deng Xiaohong, the vice-director of the Beijing Health Bureau, said the emergency blueprint is also designed to deal with other possible emergencies like mass poisonings.

The plan, expected to be finalized in the third quarter of the year, will include the establishment of an emergency headquarters, a citywide information system and an illness-prevention system.

Deng said it is not known whether SARS is a seasonal disease as it is not fully understood at this stage.

She said the health authority would be very cautious and spare no effort to strengthen prevention against the virus.

She also predicted that the travel advisory imposed by the World Health Organization (WHO) against Beijing could be lifted in about a week as the city is rapidly moving forward to meet the requirements for the removal of the ban.

"There are 134 SARS patients in the hospital now, all of them have stayed there for more than 20 days. Except for seven cases, which are critical, most of them have moved into the recovery period," Deng said.

According to Deng, many of the patients are expected to be out of hospital in a week, meeting a key condition for the removal of the ban - fewer than 60 hospitalized SARS patients.

Robert Bietz, the spokesman for the WHO's China office, said the instructions to lift the travel advisory would be given by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the director-general of WHO; and that he has not got any signal yet from Geneva that the ban would be lifted.

There were no new or suspected SARS cases reported on the Chinese mainland yesterday and Beijing has not reported a single case for nine consecutive days.

If Beijing wants to get off the WHO list, it has to have no new cases for 20 consecutive days, Deng said.

The last 18 recovered SARS patients in Beijing's Xiaotangshan Hospital were discharged yesterday.

As the country's largest SARS-designated facility, the hospital was home to 680 patients during the 51 day-period beginning on April 30, when the virus was peaking.

Eight of the patients died, resulting in a mortality rate of less than 1.2 per cent. There has been no report of infection among the hospital's 1,318 medical staff.

Referring to misdiagnosis of cases, Deng admitted that there was a possibility that the number of patients had been over-estimated, which can be attributed to the lack of a rapid diagnosis system at the early stage of SARS.

Civet link inconclusive

In another development, the conclusion that masked palm civets carry the coronavirus that causes SARS has been questioned.

Further studies are still needed before a final conclusion can be made, scientists said.

"Studies on the SARS virus and the causes are very difficult and complicated. It is hard to arrive at a final and correct finding within just two or three months," an official with the Key Science and Technology Group under the National Task Force for SARS Control and Prevention told China Daily.

"Also it is hard to say which results are authoritative, because many Chinese scientists, as well as foreign scientists, are still conducting their studies," said the official, who declined to be named.

Researchers from China Agricultural University have found that masked palm civets, which have been regarded as the biggest suspects over the past month, do not have the coronavirus linking it with SARS, the Beijing Youth Day reported yesterday.

Their finding is based on studies of 732 samples of wild animals, which were collected from Beijing, Guangdong and another five areas.

The samples came from 54 types of wild animals and 11 types of domesticated animals, including masked palm civets, bats, monkeys and snakes.

Through an internationally-used diagnostic test on the samples, researchers at the university have concluded that the animals are not the origin of the SARS virus.

"If the SARS virus really came from masked palm civets, the number of SARS patients in the country would be much higher," said the university's Vice-President Sun Qixin, who went to the Dongmenwai Market in Shenzhen to collect animal samples.

Sun said the coronavirus detected in masked palm civets shares only 77.7 per cent of the genetic code of the human SARS coronavirus.

But experts in Hong Kong said it is more than 99 per cent similar.

They looked at animals from the Shenzhen market, announcing on May 23 that the potentially deadly virus is caused by the coronavirus found in masked palm civets.

Editor: Liao Ming