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Scientists brought together by the World Health Organization to review the data on SARS say that public health measures have been effective in containing the disease in many countries and should work eventually in China and Taiwan, where SARS is now concentrated. Crucial measures that have broken the chain of person-to-person transmission of the SARS virus are the detection and treatment of suspected cases as soon as they are identified and then the quarantining of all contacts. The measures also include providing timely public information and alerts to travelers

Did the SARS virus jump species from an exotic animal in a food market in China to infect a human and start a chain of transmission that has gone on for seven months? If SARS is an animal virus, did it mutate to cause a new human virus? As is standard in investigating a new disease, scientists deliberately infected animals with the SARS virus in one avenue of research. Experiments performed on primates in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, helped convince scientists that the new coronavirus was the cause of SARS. And experiments by scientists in Canada have shown that pigs and chickens are not vulnerable to SARS. Finding the SARS virus in an animal would still not tell scientists how the first person became infected with SARS, and health officials would have to determine whether the virus from animals was continuing to fuel the human epidemic. So far, the W.H.O. says, human coughs have clearly been the principal means that humans have spread SARS around the world

The rejections have been based on the rivalry between China and Taiwan dating to 1949 when the two split amid civil war. China considers Taiwan a province. Taiwan has sought observer status at the W.H.O. As an observer, Taiwan would not be allowed to vote but could attend W.H.O. meetings, and its sovereignty would be implied. In March, shortly after the W.H.O. issued a global alert about the threat of SARS, it asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to work with Taiwan on the SARS epidemic, Dr. [David L. Heymann] said. Employees at the Miyako Hotel in Osaka, Japan, had their temperatures monitored yesterday as a precaution against SARS. A doctor from Taiwan who was a guest at the hotel had exhibited SARS-like symptoms. (Takeshi Tokitsu/Asahi Shimbun, via Associated Press)

Tommy Thompson, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, seemed to take the view that SARS was endemic when he told reporters in Brussels earlier in the day that he believed SARS would probably reappear and cause deaths in the United States and Europe in the fall

The experience of carrying out measures to detect SARS and control the infection in areas with large numbers of cases shows that ''you can contain'' SARS, Dr. [Henk Bekedam] told reporters by telephone from Geneva where the W.H.O. is holding its annual meeting. Tommy G. Thompson, the United States secretary of health and human services, seemed to take the view that SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, was endemic when he told reporters in Brussels earlier in the day that he believed that SARS would probably reappear and cause deaths in the United States and Europe in the fall. Dr. Bekedam said the W.H.O. and Chinese officials were making a major effort to determine the original source of the SARS virus in nature. If SARS jumped species, health officials need to find the source so they can develop strategies to deal with such animal reservoirs to prevent similar introductions in the future, he said

The rejections have been based on the rivalry between China and Taiwan dating to 1949 when the two split amid civil war. China considers Taiwan a rebel province. Taiwan has sought observer status at the World Health Organization. As an observer, Taiwan would not be allowed to vote but could attend agency meetings, and its sovereignty would be implied. The United Nations has long taken the position that only China is a member. This year Taiwan is battling an epidemic of SARS. The United States said that it supported Taiwan's bid because it would help it contain SARS. In March, shortly after the World Health Organization issued a global alert about the threat of SARS, it asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to work with Taiwan on the SARS epidemic, [David Heymann] said

In addressing delegates from the W.H.O.'s 192 member countries at their annual meeting, Dr. [Jong-Wook Lee] said he would seek $200 million from donor countries to provide the staff and the training needed to improve disease monitoring. Ninety percent of the new funds would go to train more epidemiologists and develop field laboratories in poor countries, as well as to evaluate the global response to new diseases like SARS. China arrested a man accused of deliberately spreading the SARS virus and who could be executed if convicted, Reuters reported, citing a report from the Xinhua news agency. The man, Liu Baocheng, who recovered from SARS, was arrested as he left a hospital in Henan Province in central China. Mr. Liu, a migrant worker, escaped from a hospital twice while he was being treated for SARS. He was caught by the police, who returned him to the hospital. At the meeting yesterday, Dr. Lee paid tribute to Dr. Carlos Urbani, a W.H.O. physician who discovered and treated the earliest cases of SARS while working in Hanoi, Vietnam. Dr. Urbani died of SARS on March 29. His widow, Giuliana Chiorrini, was present at the meeting

An American doctor advising Taiwan on fighting its SARS epidemic has come down with symptoms of the respiratory disease and will be flown home by air ambulance with three of his healthy colleagues, the governments of both countries said on Thursday. It's not certain the doctor, Chesley Richards Jr., 42, an epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has SARS. Richards didn't treat patients in Taiwan, but visited wards where patients were isolated, wearing a respirator, to see whether Taiwanese hospitals were doing everything correctly to prevent new intra-hospital infections

If Dr. [Chesley L. Richards Jr.] does have SARS, it could deal Taiwan another blow in its outbreak. He attended a meeting on Monday morning in the ''control room'' at Taiwan's Center for Disease Control with the top Taiwanese health officials leading their country's battle against the epidemic. Although Dr. Richards was in meetings at Taiwan's Center for Disease Control command center, people at the meetings did nothing because he did not seem sick, said Dr. Steve Kuo, the new director of coordination for Taiwan's SARS committee. Dr. [Julie L. Gerberding] said that the possibility that an expert in hospital infection control might have been infected in a hospital underlined the difficulty of protecting against the SARS virus. The C.D.C. was invited to Canada to consult when Canadian hospitals had a similar problem. Dr. Richards could have been infected elsewhere in Taiwan, but the hospital was the ''leading hypothesis,'' she said

Last week, scientists in Hong Kong and at the Center for Disease Control in Shenzen, just across the Hong Kong border in Guangdong province in mainland China, reported finding the SARS virus in three species of animals -- Himalayan, or masked, palm civets; raccoon dogs; and badgers -- bought in a food market in Shenzen. That discovery suggested, but did not prove, that the SARS virus infects animals in the wild, making it virtually impossible to eradicate the disease. Dr. Klaus Stoehr, the scientific director of WHO's investigation of SARS in Geneva, said that a team of virologists headed by Dr. Malik Peiris of Hong Kong University tested blood taken from 10 workers in the market and found antibodies to the SARS virus in five. Antibodies are specific proteins that the immune system forms when it mounts an attack against a microbe. Although the findings are not definitive, 'they strengthen the suggestion that animals play a role in transmitting SARS, Stoehr said. The findings, he said, 'suggest that the spectrum of disease is wider than what we saw' when SARS was first detected in March as a severe form of atypical pneumonia in patients in Hanoi, Vietnam and Hong Kong