BERKELEY BANS ASIAN STUDENTS UNIVERSITY'S SARS FEARS LIMIT SUMMER ADMISSIONS.

Byline: Staff and Wire Services

BERKELEY - The University of California at Berkeley has taken the unusual step of turning away about 500 summer students from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore because of the large number of SARS cases reported in those countries.

University officials said Monday that the decision was based on advice from the city's health officer and campus health experts. Students enrolled at other campuses in the University of California system will not be affected, but on Monday night the University of California system issued a statement urging its campus officials to ``strongly consider suspending or postponing upcoming programs'' involving such students.

``I deeply regret that we will not be accepting enrollments of students from these areas,'' UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl announced in an e-mail sent Friday to faculty and staff members and posted on the university's Web site.

Neither the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, nor California State University, Northridge, has a policy to bar foreign students from SARS-based countries.

``If the airlines are doing a good job screening, we don't bar anybody from coming to summer school,'' said John Charles, assistant director for international programs at CSUN.

``For the time being, we are going with business as usual,'' added David Unruh, director of UCLA summer sessions, who learned of Cal's policy from banished students scrambling to get into UCLA. ``We have no evidence that these students pose any more threat than any others who travel.''

Dr. David Dassey, deputy medical director of acute communicable diseases for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, said it sounded as if Berkeley's decision was based on financial, rather than medical, reasons.

``I don't think it's necessary for medical reasons that this be done,'' he said. The challenge for any administrator might be if a student in a dorm contracts SARS, who will foot the bill for his or her isolation.

There have been no reported cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome at Berkeley, but John F. Cummins, an associate chancellor, said the university was not prepared to deal with the ``labor-intensive measures'' that would be necessary if any summer students became ill and needed to be quarantined.

He said the Berkeley city health officer, Dr. Poki Namkung, strongly recommended the ban. A spokeswoman for the city's Department of Health and Human Services said Namkung was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

``If any of these students within their first 10 days of arrival became symptomatic, then the medical requirements, including the voluntary isolation, are very labor-intensive and are something we would not be prepared to deal with,'' Cummins said.