The number of new SARS cases in China rose again to 26 today from just 12 in the previous 24 hours, the lowest since the government began giving daily updates on the epidemic on April 20.
China has steadily reported a decrease in new SARS cases since a peak on April 28, when 203 new cases were recorded over a 24 hour period.
Senior schools in Beijing reopened today after a month-long shutdown to stop the spread of SARS. 1.7m students were sent home in April when the number of infections spiked.
Taiwan's SARS crisis escalated after a record 65 new cases and eight deaths were recorded in the wake of an island-wide travel alert issued yesterday.
The new cases - nearly double the previous daily record - took Taiwan's toll to 483 infections and 60 fatalities.
Hong Kong recorded just three more SARS cases, but officials expressed concern over a new case at a hard-hit housing estate.
Officials there were continuing to lobby the WHO to lift its travel warning, issued on 2 April last, as three women, aged between 70 and 85, became the latest to die.
Elsewhere, the WHO representative in Cambodia reported the first suspected case of the disease there - a 16-year-old boy who had returned from studying in China.
SARS may have come from space, according to astrobiologists in Britain and India.
In a letter that will appear in Saturday's issue of the medical weekly The Lancet, they say the idea for this came from experiments carried out in January 2001 in which a tethered sterile balloon collected samples from the stratosphere.
'Large quantities of viable micro-organisms' were captured at an altitude of 41,000m.
The sheer volume of this stream of micro-organisms raises the possibility that some of them will survive and a few may prove to be bacteria or viruses that are dangerous for humans.
The letter says that the great flu pandemic of 1918-19, which killed tens of millions of people, may have been just such an example of a disease sown from space.
