On the heels of a biting cold front, the national SARS control and reporting system went into operation yesterday morning to provide 24-hour online monitoring and consultation about the disease.

The system will guarantee fast reporting of new cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), said Li Liming, director of Chinese Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

The system can accommodate up to 20,000 users at the same time, and they can also access SARS medical information and receive online consulting, Li said.

All hospitals at the county level and above will soon be connected to the system, and so far more than 13,000 hospitals have access.

In South China's Guangdong Province, where the world's first SARS case was reported, many anti-SARS initiatives have been launched, including close co-operation with the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC), which also had several SARS cases earlier this year.

BC Premier Gordon Campbell met Guangdong Governor Huang Huahua in the province's capital of Guangzhou yesterday to explore further opportunities for mutual co-operation in diagnosing and treating the potentially fatal disease.

Guangdong detected the world's first SARS patient in the city of Heyuan on November 16 of 2002 while Canada reported the most SARS cases outside of Asia.

Campbell, who arrived in Guangzhou from Shanghai on Tuesday evening, also met other senior Guangdong health officials, experts and doctors of respiratory tract diseases at a conference on SARS vaccine research and production.

Campbell expressed his hope that BC and Guangdong would further their co-operation in research and production of the vaccine against SARS and prevention and treatment of respiratory tract disease.

The conference was jointly organized by SARS Accelerated Vaccine Initiative (SAVI) of Canada and Guangdong Provincial Centre for Disease Control.

In addition to further co-operation in research and production of vaccines, SAVI is expecting to bring the vaccines developed and produced in Canada to conduct human clinical tests in Guangdong Province in the future.

Meanwhile both sides negotiated to exchange clinical samples between SAVI and Guangdong Provincial Centre for Disease Control, and explored collaboration opportunities in other areas of public health.

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