The World Health Organization (WHO) expert team visited a county in northern Hebei Province Friday, initiating their first field inspection of anti-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) work in China's rural areas.

On Friday morning, two of the four members of the WHO team arrived in Xushui County, under the jurisdiction of Baoding city, 120 km south of Beijing, where they heard the government's reports on the local reporting mechanism and anti-SARS measures.

"It's vital for the rest of the world to know your experience (on SARS prevention in rural areas), and now the whole world is looking at the experience you have," said WHO expert James Maguire during the briefing.

Maguire said he became more confident about China's ability to curb the disease in its vast rural areas after seeing that there are very rigorous strategies in place. And the strategies have potential in resolving problems, he added.

The expert team then traveled to the county's epidemic control station where they held a detailed discussion with the staff there, focusing specifically on how the reporting mechanism works, how the station supervises the mobile population and how the situation in villages is reported to the station and then to upper levels. They also inquired about the staff and resources reserves.

Around noon Friday, the experts went to Dongshiduan Township, which comprises 15 villages with a total population of 33,600, and randomly selected a village for inspection.

The village has, as introduced by local officials, adopted a "ten-household" supervision mechanism. That means every 10 households has one information collector who is held responsible for gathering SARS-related information among the families, for example, how many have returned from affected areas. The 10 households are also expected to keep an eye on each other.

Seeing a bulletin in the village with the names of all the information collectors and migrant workers who have returned home, Maguire asked to see an information collector and then visited a villager who recently returned from Beijing and was currently under a 15-day quarantine at home.

Standing in the courtyard, Maguire waved to the villager, saying he hoped that the man would be soon be released from quarantine.

Maguire said he was impressed by the "community involvement" of the anti-SARS measures. "That depends on the coordination of all people in the community," he noted.

"You've set up a very complex network, and the coordination is also very complicated," said Maguire.

"It's almost like the net is up and the SARS is trying to get through it," he said, "But it'll be hard to get through since the net seems to be very tight."

Meanwhile, another WHO expert, Hiroshi Watanabe, went to the village clinic. He looked through the body temperature records of all the returnees and inquired in detail about the physical check-up and quarantine measures taken with respect to those people.

The other two WHO experts inspected anti-SARS measures in the communities in the city during the day.

(Xinhua News Agency May 9, 2003)