South China's Guangdong Province is planning to set up a bank to store materials related to SARS, the provincial disease prevention and control center said.

The center is one of the four institutions authorized by the Health Ministry to store specimens taken from SARS patients, suspected patients and those who had close contact with infected patients, according to a Wednesday report in the Southern Metropolitan News.

The other three are the national and Beijing disease prevention and control centers and the country's military medical academy.

Xu Ruiheng, vice director-general of the Guangdong center, said its extremely strict rules involving SARS research and specimen storage would leave no possibility for medical staff to contract the disease. Only 10 researchers would be allowed to enter a laboratory where experiments on SARS and AIDS viruses are conducted. The rules are laid down in a number of publications.

The laboratory, which has the highest security level in the province and the second highest of a four-grade national standard, is completely sealed and air must be filtered and disinfected three times before being circulated.

The workers are inoculated against and tested for several infectious diseases while those with skin scratches are banned from the laboratory. Daily checks of body temperatures have already been implemented.

(Shenzhen Daily, December 26, 2003)