A person can now report directly to the country's top health authorities if he or she, along with many others, is suffering from an unknown or undiagnosed disease.

The Emergency Response Guideline on Mass and Unidentified Diseases, issued yesterday, is the first State-level draft plan to encourage individuals to report such cases directly to the Ministry of Health or the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention (NCDPC).

"The move is aimed at collecting data on disease outbreaks as fast as possible so that countermeasures can be taken," Huang Yizhong, a doctor of infectious disease at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, said.

Unidentified diseases refer to mass outbreaks of an infection among a group of people who show similar clinical symptoms but their disease can't be clearly diagnosed by medical institutions at the county level or above, the document said.

The rate of infection in such cases can be very high with epidemiological correlation and ambiguous diagnoses, the draft said. Most of such outbreaks pose a serious health hazard.

Local medical institutions, including hospitals, private clinics and disease control and preventions centers have been told to report such incidents to the local health administration or the specially designated departments within two hours of an outbreak.

Those who can report it directly to the national health authorities have been encouraged to do so, and include disease control and potential hazard assessments in the report.

Some unidentified infections hit schools and densely populated areas last year, resulting both in economic loss and human casualties, an earlier ministry report had said.

"The scheme is very important for handling possible outbreaks that can become more frequent and complex in the country during spring draws near," Huang said.

The plan prescribes a series disease control measures like sealing off infected areas temporarily, taking disinfecting steps timely and good public health training.

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