The top UN expert on infectious diseases has arrived in Beijing to investigate China's SARS outbreak and find some answers to questions that could stall the lifting of a WHO travel warning.
Dr David Heymann, the World Health Organisation's executive director for communicable diseases, has been a leading sceptic of China's reported SARS caseload as the numbers have plummeted in recent weeks. He was scheduled to meet Health Ministry officials.
Heymann said today he had come "to congratulate the government on the excellent work that they've done and to get some answers to a few questions that we have".
Beijing, the most infected city in the world, has reported no new SARS on six of the past eight days.
It reported one more from the disease in the 24 hours to 10 a.m. (3 a.m. British time) on Wednesday, but the Health Ministry said there were none elsewhere in China and no new deaths.
However, the WHO has expressed concern about China's failure to record how about half its patients caught the potentially deadly respiratory illness and to diagnose properly some milder cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
Heymann said he did not dispute the accuracy of official figures in a country criticised widely for covering up for months the extent of the outbreak after the disease first appeared in the southern province of Guangdong.
"I have not said that. We have come here to look and talk with the government," he said.
He said WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland would make the final decision whether to lift the advisory against travel to Beijing and four surrounding areas, Tianjin, Inner Mongolia, Hebei and Shanxi.
"But there are three criteria: the magnitude of the outbreak and the number of new cases occurring each day, the type of transmission occurring in the community and whether or not there are exported cases from the country," Heymann said.
Beijing has reported the world's highest number of SARS cases with more than 2,500 infections and nearly 200 deaths. Nationwide, the virus has infected more than 5,300.
The illness has paralysed China's tourism industry - arrivals were down a year-on-year 30 percent in April - and given many foreign investors second thoughts.
Beijing and its neighbours have met one criteria for lifting the advisory - reporting fewer than five new cases a day for nearly two weeks in a row.
The city, where some 500 SARS patients remain in hospital, is the only area yet to satisfy a WHO requirement of fewer than 60 in hospital, although the WHO has said it might consider bumping up that figure given the city's population of 14 million.
WHO officials have indicated the biggest sticking point involved China's inability to track the path of contagion.
In Beijing, 70 percent of cases diagnosed since May 1 had no recorded contact, up from around 50 percent of cases before then, a WHO expert told a news conference last week.