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Beijing Comes Under Fire for Stonewalling the World Health Organization over SARS Again !Why is it that health officials in Beijing stupidly make the same mistakes again and again? Why do they persist in reporting they have the SARS virus under control, when it is apparent that such reports consist of little more than blatant lies and subtle evasions? On June 3rd the question of official Chinese dissembling about SARS again reared its ugly head in world news reports. A Reuters report quoted WHO officials saying that they had come to mistrust Beijing's statistics showing a fall off in the...

For the first time since April, Chinese officials on Wednesday reported no new SARS cases or deaths and said there's been a large decrease in the number of SARS cases in Beijing. But the World Health Organization greeted the news from China with skepticism, saying that China lacks credibility on its reporting of SARS, the Associated Press reports. About 100 new cases of SARS were being reported each day in Beijing at the beginning of May. That dropped to about 50 a day by mid-May and decreased to single digits in recent days. Beijing has had about half of China's...

New SARS disaster looms in BeijingBy Asia Times Online Staff HONG KONG - In recent days, a community in Beijing has been living in a state of constant anxiety. It has experienced what may prove to be as large a localized outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome as occurred in Hong Kong's now-famous Amoy Gardens, where in late March more than 300 people were infected with SARS, of whom 35 eventually died. It is obvious that some people have covered up the outbreak, and the situation has not been represented whatsoever in government-issued SARS statistics. The outbreak occurred outside of Beijing's Fifth...