WHO inspection team to visit province and see for itself there are no Sars cases
The WHO has decided not to remove Guangdong from its list of infected areas, nor will it withdraw its travel advisory on areas neighbouring Beijing, saying more information was needed first.
A team of World Health Organisation experts will be in Guangzhou today to verify whether there really have been no Sars cases for 20 days, said Marilu Lingad, a WHO spokeswoman in Manila.
She said the agency was unable to remove Guangdong from its list of Sars-affected areas because it had not received enough information about the last case.
'The last case was reported on May 17. We need more details about the case, like when it was isolated, as well as whether the contacts have been established,' she said. 'Once we have all the details we will take another look at lifting the status.'
Ian Simpson, a WHO spokesman in Geneva, said the health body would not lift the travel advisories on Tianjin, Inner Mongolia or Shanxi until Monday at the earliest because of missing data from those three regions.
Although none of these three areas has reported a new Sars case this month, Mr Simpson said the WHO wanted data on how Sars spread in each place.