The World Health Organization is urging China to expand an intensive monitoring program for health workers and areas hit hard this year by SARS to ensure that any new outbreak is caught early, a WHO official said on Friday in Beijing.

China has created a "very good system" nationwide to detect infectious diseases since the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, said Dr Henk Bekedam, WHO's Beijing representative.

But WHO wants to expand a program that monitors health workers and patients at a group of hospitals in Beijing and in Guangdong and Shanxi provinces, he said. Those areas accounted for most of the 349 deaths reported on China's mainland.

An expanded system also would monitor people who work in Chinese laboratories that handle the virus, Bekedam said. The only reported SARS case since the disease ebbed in June was a 27-year-old lab employee in Singapore who later recovered.

Chinese health experts have said they expect SARS to re-emerge during flu season this winter, though they say they can't predict how large the outbreak might be.

However, a majority of Chinese are not worried about a possible reoccurrence of SARS this winter, a survey of citizens in nine major cities around the country revealed.

According to a Market-Expert (Shanghai) Consultant Corporation survey conducted this month, some 59 percent of 2,815 families interviewed in major cities, including Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou, said they were not afraid of a second outbreak.

About 25.4 percent said they were "not so worried," while 12.4 percent said they were "worried." In addition, 3.2 percent responded that they were "very worried."

The survey also said some 66 percent of respondents would take precaution measures - such as frequently washing hands and keeping rooms well ventilated - to prevent the disease.

After getting through the SARS breakout this past spring, more than 80 percent of people said had changed their hygiene habits - such as washing hands more frequently and having stopped spitting and littering in public places.

"Such an attitude changed voluntarily after the SARS epidemic," said Liu Weiguang, a Shanghai Public Sanitation Bureau official.

He added that spitting and littering in public places had been reduced after the SARS period "but a good sanitary environment was not formed in a day."

Only by establishing regular and systematic precautions can diseases be prevented, officials said.