A leading Chinese SARS expert has suggested that the disease's death rate of 15 percent as estimated by the World Health Organization (WHO) might have been an overestimation.

Zhong Nanshan, director of Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases who has been fighting SARS since late last year, said that even on the Chinese mainland where SARS had claimed the most victims, the death rate would not go beyond 6 percent, adding that 15 percent was inaccurate as an average rate for the rest of the world.

Zhong made the remarks during an interval at the "ASEAN, China, Japan and ROK (10+3) High-level Symposium on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome" which began Tuesday.

Zhong called into question WHO experts, who said at the meeting that estimates of a three to four percent death rate made at the early stages of the SARS outbreak was "too optimistic," and they believed the rate should be 14 to 15 percent.

WHO had made its estimation mainly based on data from Canada and Singapore, where the SARS death rate was "indeed very high," said Zhong, who is also an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Panel.

Some WHO experts had suggested China's data was unreliable, as they doubted the country's ability to make correct diagnoses.

Zhong said China had found some effective measures for SARS treatment and prevention, citing his institute, where most of the cases were very severe, but the death rate stood at only about 4 percent.

SARS diagnosis in China was generally accurate and the misdiagnosis rate was very low, he added.