Filed at 2:32 p.m. ET

HONG KONG (Reuters) - The World Health Organization said on Saturday China still was not providing enough information on SARS in the country, where villagers fearing contagion dumped fish on cars from Beijing to keep people from the city away. Toronto and Singapore, other SARS trouble spots, kept up their vigils, reporting new cases but stressing they were only suspected infections of the deadly respiratory disease.

In Geneva, the WHO said its global SARS total as of Saturday was 7,296 cases and 526 deaths.

Of those, well over 4,800 cases and 235 deaths were in China where the virus is believed to have originated last year and which has faced fierce criticism for being slow in admitting to the disease before it pledged to be more forthcoming.

The WHO, however, said it still needed more data.

``We don't have detailed information from China on about half of the cases, which would allow us to track SARS effectively,'' said spokeswoman Maria Cheng.

``There is a lot of missing data and we are trying to fill in the blanks. Our team (in China) has made it clear we need this information to stop the spread of SARS. We hope this information will be coming.''

China said five new deaths on Saturday took the toll to 235, and also reported 85 new cases.

Villagers who associate the disease with urban living put up barricades to keep out city-dwellers.

They dumped rotten fish and shrimp on about a dozen Beijing cars at a popular picnic spot outside the capital to send city folk a message to stay away, the Beijing Times reported.

``Who lets city people come to the suburbs at a time like this? They deserved it!'' the paper quoted villagers as saying.

CANADA CAUTION

Together, China and its autonomous territory Hong Kong have been hardest hit by severe acute respiratory syndrome with 447 deaths and more than 6,550 cases -- the vast majority.

A traveler earlier took the disease to Toronto, sparking an outbreak there, and a hospital in the Canadian city sent 30 more people into isolation after a nurse administrator developed SARS-like symptoms.

A senior doctor at the hospital said he was confident she did not have SARS and the quarantine would be lifted soon.

``We're being awfully cautious,'' Donald Low, chief of microbiology at Mount Sinai Hospital, said on Friday.

``Every time that somebody develops a respiratory tract infection and can be linked in any way (to SARS) the onus is on us to rule it out. I think that is the proper thing to do.''

SARS has killed 23 people in Canada's largest city, the only place outside Asia where people are known to have died from it -- though Nigeria said on Friday a man from Taiwan had died there after showing SARS-like symptoms.

Twenty-four SARS patients are in Toronto hospitals and three are critically ill. Low said it would be premature for the WHO to take Toronto off its SARS-affected area list as the virus lingers in hospitals, and called for a reassessment in a week.

BARRICADES IN CHINA

Singapore, which has the world's third-highest fatalities, reported no new cases of infection from the flu-like virus for the 13th day on Saturday, but said there were two suspect cases.

The city state says it needs another week without anyone contracting SARS before declaring the epidemic under control.

In Hong Kong, infections stayed in the single digits for the seventh day, as the government said SARS killed two more people and infected seven.

Hong Kong says the WHO will consider lifting its warning against non-essential travel to the territory when new daily infections fall below five for three consecutive days, and the number of active cases drops to 60 or less.

In the Chinese city of Baoding, 150 km (95 miles) south of Beijing, a barricade of barbed wire at a block of shanty dwellings shows the fear sweeping the vast nation.

Responding to a government battle-cry to shield outlying areas from contagion, residents of the more than 1,000 households there are turning their neighborhoods into ghettos, even though no one has caught SARS or been quarantined.

``They say that if you get this disease, you won't live,'' said Wang Yaping, 25. ``Without this barbed wire, we couldn't keep out peddlers who mill around town selling fruit.''

Elsewhere in China, villagers have overturned ambulances, ransacked hospitals, dug ditches and summoned exorcists to ward off the SARS virus that might have been brought in by migrant laborers returning from stricken areas.