The head of the World Health Organisation, Ms Gro Harlem Brundtland, has punctured official optimism that the SARS outbreak is coming under control, by announcing that the epidemic has not yet peaked in China.
Despite her stark assessment, EU health ministers meeting in Brussels last night rejected a call from Italy for screening of all travellers from SARS-affected areas on arrival in the EU.
Visitors to the EU from countries affected by SARS will have to fill in questionnaires and provide contact numbers during their stay but they will not be subjected to medical screening.
Speaking after the EU meeting, the Minister for Health, Mr Martin, said the Government had no plans to introduce new measures to screen travellers to Ireland.
He said the most effective way of halting the spread of the disease was to screen travellers as they left affected areas. "All the expert advice is saying that we have to screen at the point of exit and that screening at the point of entry is not particularly effective," he said.
Earlier, Ms Brundtland told a news conference: "We can't say with any certainty today whether the total picture of the outbreak has peaked or not.
"Certainly, we have not seen a peak in China yet. We still have a considerable size of outbreak in Hong Kong. "
In Beijing, WHO officials are still complaining that despite high-level promises of full disclosure, the Chinese authorities are still holding back vital information.
Ms Mangai Balasegaram, a spokeswoman for the WHO's Beijing office, said the city's authorities still do not fully understand the course of the epidemic in that city.
Critically missing in many cases, she said, was information gathered when patients fell sick. Thus, she added, the city was still unable to identify patterns in the outbreak - whether a few highly contagious individuals, known as "super-spreaders", were causing many cases, or whether certain neighbourhoods or buildings in the city accounted for a disproportionate number of the infected.
The EU Commissioner for Health, Mr David Byrne, said that Europe had been successful in containing the virus given that nobody in the EU had died of SARS and that there had been only one case of local transmission.
He said that screening people who arrived in the EU was not only ineffective but could create a false sense of security.
EU leaders agreed to introduce "measures, consistent throughout the European Union, for information and full traceability of international travellers arriving or in transit from affected areas".