18 June 2003 12:50 GMT

by Henry Nicholls

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The global population can expect to face a new infectious disease every year, warns the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), as experts gather to draw lessons from the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, 100 days after the first WHO alert was issued.

"SARS will not be the last new disease to take advantage of conditions in a globalized world," predicted WHO director general Gro Harlem Brundtland. "In the past two decades, new diseases emerged at the unprecedented rate of one per year," she said. "This trend is likely to continue."

David Baltimore, Nobel prize-winning virologist and president of the California Institute of Technology echoes the view. "It was and is inevitable that new agents will appear," he said. "Each animal has its own range of viruses, many of which have the potential to get into the human population."

SARS will probably be eliminated from most places in the world, says Baltimore, but adds that stamping it out of China is clearly the greatest challenge. "The world will isolate China unless it controls SARS," he said, "so they have a very strong incentive to do that."

Back in April, the Chinese authorities were widely accused of attempting to cover up the extent of the SARS epidemic. "Our response at the very beginning was insufficient," admitted Gao Qiang, China's vice-minister for health at the WHO global meeting on SARS in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia this week.

But Qiang puts this down to a lack of understanding of the disease, weaknesses in the public health system and emergency services, insufficient laws and regulations, and an inadequate alert system. Once the government realized the severity of the epidemic, he says, it acted quickly and responsibly.

"The decisive measures we have taken have achieved noticeable effects," he said, "and we have accumulated valuable experience in the prevention and control of SARS."

WHO's Brundtland praised the way that Vietnam and Singapore dealt with the disease, and predicts that their successes would soon be realized in Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Canada.

The most compelling lesson that should be learned from SARS is the importance of prompt and open reporting, she says. "Attempts to conceal cases of an infectious disease for fear of social and economic consequences must now be recognized as carrying a very high price," she said.

Meanwhile, vaccine research continues apace, says Marie-Paule Kieny, director of WHO's initiative for vaccine research. "Both academical institutions and vaccine manufacturers have started producing the first candidate vaccines," she told BioMedNet News. "These should be available for testing in animal preclinical models ... within a few weeks or months," she said.