The severe economic impact of SARS on Asia and beyond was expected to be a key theme at a meeting of Asia-Pacific trade ministers in Thailand.

Hard-hit Taiwan logged its fourth straight day of single-digit growth in the number of new cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome yesterday with just four.

And China, where SARS first appeared late last year, reported just two new cases no deaths on Sunday for the first time since April 20 when the government came clean after a cover-up that grossly understated the extent of the outbreak.

But the death toll in Canada's biggest city, Toronto, rose to 31 on Sunday when a 60-year-old woman died and authorities said they were investigating five other deaths that may be linked to SARS.

More than 5,000 people have been quarantined in Canada, most of them in Toronto, since a new cluster of cases surfaced in mid May, after the World Health Organisation (WHO) had taken the city off its list of SARS-affected places.

In China, the WHO said it was encouraged by the fall-off in the number of new cases but said the SARS virus would be hard to eliminate.

"This is not the time to drop our guard," said the UN health agency's spokesman in Beijing, Bob Dietz.

"We take a look at Canada where all of a sudden this thing just pops up seemingly out of nowhere with a really developed healthcare system and we realize that it's not an easy thing to get rid of," he said.

By Sunday, 332 people had died and 5,328 had been infected in China but the number of new cases reported has fallen sharply in the past three weeks from more than 100 a day.

"The figures look pretty good. Hard to believe sometimes, but we are taking them on good faith," Dietz said.

SARS has killed more than 750 people and infected more than 8,300 around the world since it appeared in southern China's Guangdong province last year.