Health Ministers from Southeast and North Asian countries severely affected by SARS on Saturday agreed to have stringent pre-departure checks and mandatory health declarations for all travellers to contain the virus which has so far killed 291 people worldwide.

A senior World Health Organisation official said a possible vaccine may be identified within months though it could take up to three years before it was ready for mass use.

"WHO is arranging a meeting in the next week or so to bring together world experts on vaccine development partially because we need to get the process moving now," said Mark Salter of the WHO Global Alert and Response unit in Geneva.

"A candidate vaccine may be available within months, but there are a lot of processes in terms of safety which need to be gone through before the vaccine can be used on human beings," he told reporters.

Apart from the departure checks and health cards, the Kuala Lumpur meeting agreed that airlines should make provisions to isolate anyone developing SARS symptoms of fever, sore throat, cough and cold during a flight and ensure planes are routinely disinfected.

Governments were also called on to set up SARS task forces and designate a hotline to share information with each other.

All sides will swap ideas on best practices for prevention and treatment, including sharing information on the movements of infected cases and persons they come in contact with.

The meeting attended by the ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations, plus China, Japan, Korea and Hong Kong was billed as a critical step in the battle against the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Their heads of government at a crisis summit on SARS in Bangkok on April 29 will formally approve the measures agreed upon by the ministers.

"What we decide today and at the Heads of States meeting on Tuesday next week will determine the future course of this outbreak. We must be absolutely relentless in the search for every possible case of the virus," Shigeru Omi, head of the WHO Western Pacific regional office, said in an opening speech.

"The threat posed by SARS is unprecedented although the number of cases and deaths is not large in comparison with those caused by some other diseases," Omi added.

But Salter said there were successes, citing Vietnam where five people have died so far, but no fresh cases were reported in nearly two weeks.

Salter said the number of cases reported by China, where the outbreak first occurred last November, tallied more closely with independent sources since the government ordered greater openness.

A joint statement in the meeting urged the WHO to speed up the search for reliable test kits to diagnose sufferers as also a vaccine, while Salter gave an assurance that no time was being lost.

"You have to go through various animal test trials and various trials on healthy individuals before you start giving (the vaccine) to a lot of people. I think we are looking at two years, three years may be before a final vaccine."

Omi noted that economies of the affected countries have been severly hit by SARS.

"Tourism has almost disappeared. Normal life has also been severely disrupted. In some countries schools and offices have been closed. International travel has been dramatically reduced," Omi said.

Malaysia's Health Minister Chua Jui Meng noted the ASEAN countries had only reported 10 per cent of the total deaths so far.

Malaysia, which like Thailand and the Philippines has reported only two deaths so far, is particularly fearful that the virus could be carried across from neighbouring Singapore, where 19 people have died.

"Should SARS continue to spread the global economic consequences could be great in a closely interconnected and interdependent world," Meng said.

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