According to Ramsammy, there is no reported case of the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in Guyana at the moment.

As such, he said the report which appeared in the Kaieteur News yesterday under the banner-headline ‘Guyana finds first case of suspected SARS’ is “absolute nonsense”, “misleasing” and “not true”.

He also confirmed that senior officials from his Ministry visited the ‘patient’ and have determined that her illness “is not even close to SARS”.

According to him, both the Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Rudolph Cummings and the Director of the Centre for Disease Control, Dr. Navindra Persaud, who is also coordinating the local SARS efforts, saw the ‘patient’ and determined that the patient is not, in any way, affected by or has SARS.

“As far as I am aware, there are no cases - reported or suspected -of SARS in Guyana,” Ramsammy told the Chronicle.

The Health Minister also angrily lashed out at the ‘medical sources’ quoted in the Kaieteur News report, saying they are “total idiots” to be giving such misleading reports to the media.

According to the Kaieteur News report, one medical expert explained that “from all appearances and the symptoms shown so far, I am highly suspicious that the person may have caught the infection. The person has a travel history, but tests are continuing.”

Ramsammy, who was in Berbice over the weekend, told this newspaper over the telephone that he will be holding a new-conference in Georgetown today on the issue.

He noted that the Health Ministry has been constantly upgrading the country’s Port Health facilities to deal with SARS.

The fast-spreading SARS virus and the mounting death toll of victims have caused worldwide attention and anxiety.

A British medical expert feels the disease may be more deadly but less contagious than first feared.

On Saturday, a World Health Organisation official said it may take years to find a vaccine for SARS, the respiratory virus that has killed almost 300 people and infected some 5,000 in more than 20 countries since it emerged in southern china late last year.

Canada has been hard hit by SARS with the only deaths outside Asia, all 19 in the Toronto area. The City has announced a multilingual advertising campaign to try to restore its reputation, which was dealt a major economic blow by the virus and a WHO warning to travelers to stay away.

The World Health Organization chief, Ms. Gro Harlem Brundtland, was quoted yesterday by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as saying that the world has a "window of opportunity" to contain the pneumonia-like virus which has claimed about 300 lives.

Brundtland said the world still had a "window of opportunity to avoid the virus becoming endemic, such as flu and HIV... to contain it - lessen it where it is, and stop it spreading".