Li Liming, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, has resigned for "mismanagement of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus," at the nation's most important infectious disease laboratory, the official Xinhua news agency said.

"Poor management of the virus triggered the SARS outbreak," Xinhua quoted sources at the health ministry as saying.

"The SARS reccurence has been determined as a case of major incident due to negligence."

Four of Li's colleagues at the center were disciplined, Xinhua said.

The laboratory -- the National Institute of Virology in Beijing -- was confirmed as the source of the country's most recent SARS outbreak, Xinhua said.

Two laboratory workers contracted the deadly virus. One of them, a 26-year-old intern, later went home to east China's Anhui province and spread the virus to others, including her mother, who later died.

The outbreak was contained in May, when the last patient was released from hospital, but only after hundreds of people who had contact with the infected people were isolated.

The outbreak sparked fears of a resurgence of the disease which caused almost 800 deaths and some 8,000 infections worldwide last year, wreaking havoc on the tourism industries in several Asian countries, after first surfacing in southern China's Guangdong province.

Details on what kind of mismanagement occurred in the latest outbreak were not revealed, but state media Thursday issued findings from a government report on the outbreak which blamed human error.

Lab workers may have triggered the infection during experiments inside the institute's laboratory, the Beijing News quoted He Xiong, director of the Beijing CDC, which conducted the investigation, as saying.

The institute and its laboratory likely became contaminated, which explained why the intern and another laboratory worker were infected even though their work did not involve handling of the virus, the Beijing News said.

He also criticized hospitals where the patients were taken for not reporting the infections and treating patients in a timely fashion.

Some hospital facilities did not have enough staff, He said. Doctors were not clear about how quickly they were required to report cases and had trouble recognizing suspected cases, he said.

China moved quickly to educate medical workers after the SARS outbreak last year after coming under criticism for initially trying to cover up the epidemic.

No other infections have occurred so far this year.

TERRA.WIRE