The old man badly needed hands to help with wheat harvesting, but could not call back his son, a migrant worker in Guangzhou which was hit by severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

Finally, the village authorities promised to send a task force armed with combine harvesters to help Wang and his peers, who also have family members working in SARS-affected urban areas.

The Wangs are among the thousands of farming households in China's villages that are engaged in a massive drive to ward off the often deadly epidemic from rural areas.

Authorities in east China's Anhui Province - which has 6 million farmers seeking fortunes far from home - are also organizing teams of tractors and harvesters to help with farming work, so that migrant workers can stay in their host cities.

"The odds are high that migrant workers could transfer the viral disease into rural regions from cities," said Li Hong, with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

Yang Zhiyong, an official with the Department of Public Health of central China's Hunan Province, yesterday confirmed that all six SARS cases in his province were migrant rural workers from south China's Guangdong Province.

While one died, the rest had recovered and been discharged from hospitals, he said.

In Beijing, nine cases of SARS among farmers living in villages in the capital's suburbs were confirmed last week.

While city health officials have so far not revealed the proportion of migrant workers among Beijing's SARS cases, Rao Keqin, an epidemic information analysis expert from the national SARS prevention and control group, said on Monday that the rate has risen.

To help prevent the lung infection spreading from the capital to rural areas, Beijing in late April required that all migrant workers stay where they are.

But the policy changed on Monday, with migrant workers who passed medical checks being given the green light to enter or leave the city, according to Wang Lichen, deputy director of Beijing Construction Commission.

The Ministry of Labor and Social Security yesterday issued an urgent notice, telling enterprises employing farmers to improve their working and living conditions.

Under no circumstances could businesses fire SARS-infected migrant workers or suspected cases, or send them back to their home towns, said the notice.

(China Daily May 14, 2003)