The State's public-health doctors are mounting a second day of strike action today after there was no sign of a resolution of their dispute yesterday.
About 300 doctors will picket health boards and the National Disease Surveillance Centre again today in a protest over pay and conditions.
The strike means there will be no monitoring of the spread of infectious diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), meningitis or measles.
The Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, said his department would be making no new money available to the Department of Health to meet the doctors' demands.
The Minister for Health, Mr Martin has been asked to intervene in the dispute.
The second day of the strike comes as two new suspected cases of the SARS were identified at St James's Hospital in Dublin.
Yesterday the hospital confirmed that it was treating two people, recently returned from Asia, as suspected SARS cases as a "purely precautionary measure".