MANILA -- The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is seeking approval to provide grants and loans of up to nearly 30 million dollars to help China and other Asian developing economies combat the SARS problem, officials said Monday.

The Manila-based ADB board would consider providing grants of seven million dollars to SARS-hit developing member countries and discuss with governments the prospect of reallocating loans of around 20 million dollars as an "emergency" move to curb the disease.

"We are carrying out rapid country assessments of our developing member countries to see how prepared they are in combating SARS, assess the immediate impact of SARS on their economies, how the countries are addressing their concerns and where the gaps are," Clay Wescott, ADP's senior public administration specialist, told a news conference, AFP reported.

He said China, the biggest SARS victim, was expected to receive an emergency technical assistance grant of two million dollars to cope with the spread of the deadly disease in the western part of the world's most populous nation.

China's western region faced a "substantial risk due to weaknesses in local health systems' capacities for surveillance, information dissemination, prevention and treatment as well as broader constraints of financial resources and high levels of poverty," a bank statement said.

ADB President Tadao Chino has written to the governors of the bank's developing member economies hit by SARS, advising them of a multi-disciplinary task force set up by the bank to assess the impact of the disease in Asia and the Pacific, officials said.

Wescott said 22 member nations were eligible for ADB's grants and loans to curb SARS and that the bank was prepared to "take shortcuts" to speed up the approval process.

The countries are Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, Cambodia, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

He said they would be eligible to reallocate loans totalling about 20 million dollars to address the SARS crisis from funds that had been previously approved for other projects.

The ADB also said it was considering signing a memorandum of understanding with the World Health Organization to jointly combat SARS, which has claimed 535 lives worldwide and infected more than 7,377. China is at the center of the global SARS crisis, with the death toll at 240 and total number of cases at 4,948.