The report found that only "heroic" efforts by dedicated health workers contained the disease, after it had claimed 44 lives in the Toronto region.

"The overall system proved woefully inadequate," said the report by the independent SARS commission, set up to learn the lessons of the outbreak.

"SARS showed Ontario's central public health system to be unprepared, fragmented, poorly led, uncoordinated, inadequately resourced, professionally impoverished, and generally incapable of discharging its mandate.

"The SARS crisis exposed deep fault lines in the structure and capacity of Ontario's public health system," the unscheduled report of interim findings said.

Its author, Justice Archie Campbell also had a sobering warning for Canadians.

"Ontario was fortunate that SARS was ultimately contained without widespread community transmission or further hospital spread, sickness and death."

"These problems need urgently to be fixed."

Campbell noted 21 "principles" for health reform including the need for a new leadership and new resources in the public system.

He said safe water, food and protection against infectious diseases should be set aside by authorities, which should improve emergency planning and preparedness.

Nurses who were in the frontlines of the SARS outbreak called on the Ontario government to act immediately to shore up the public health system.

"SARS taught us a hard lesson in how integral public health is, and how badly our public health system has eroded," said the Ontario Nurses' Association (ONA) President Linda Haslam-Stroud.

Nurses who caught SARS last year have launched a lawsuit claiming the Ontario provincial government failed to take adequate steps to protect them.

The suit, on behalf of 30 nurses, one of whom died from the disease, contends the authorities were negligent as they put their lives on the line to help victims of the outbreak last year.

SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, emerged in southern China towards the end of 2002, and rapidly spread to most corners of the country, killing 349 people. Nearly 800 people died worldwide as the disease jumped to more than 30 countries, including Canada.

TERRA.WIRE