Visitors to the European Union from countries affected by the SARS virus will have to fill in questionnaires and provide contact numbers during their stay, but they will not be subjected to medical screening.
EU health ministers meeting in Brussels last night rejected a call from Italy for screening of all travellers from affected areas on arrival in the EU.
The Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said screening would take the form of a questionnaire to be completed before departure to the EU. "It is not medical screening as there is no medical test to determine whether you have SARS," he said.
Before the meeting, the director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Ms Gro Harlem Brundtland, warned the European Commissioner on Health, Mr David Byrne, that the epidemic had not yet peaked in China. "Certainly, we have not seen a peak in China yet. We still have a considerable size of outbreak in Hong Kong," she said.
She said the outbreak was receding in Canada and was over in Vietnam, whose last case was more than 20 days ago, but no one could say with any certainty "whether the total picture of the outbreak has peaked or not".
She also said there was still no clear scientific picture of the germ which caused the highly contagious pneumonia-like virus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
"There may be two different strains or a modification, some may be tougher than others, but really now this is all speculation based on different research that has been made. We cannot sum up yet exactly where we are on that issue," she said.
The ministers discussed for almost four hours the question of screening travellers from affected areas but most believed that screening on entry would be ineffective and would create a false sense of security.
"It was mostly the countries with big tourist inflows that favoured screening at the point of entry," one official said.
The ministers agreed a number of measures to combat the epidemic, including the identification and hospitalisation of all suspect cases and the appropriate protection of hospital personnel dealing with such patients.
They also agreed that steps should be taken to ensure that all those who might have come into contact with the virus should be traceable.
Mr Byrne said that many of the measures agreed were already in place in most member-states but he complained that some airlines were not taking seriously enough their responsibility for preventing the spread of the virus.
Mr Byrne said that SARS had offered a "wake-up call" to the EU about the need to create an equivalent of the US Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta.
The ministers agreed to consider Mr Byrne's proposal for a EU-wide agency to control disease but Belgium and Germany suggested that better co-operation between national agencies could prove as effective as creating a centralised body.
