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LONDON (Reuters Health) - A leading British virologist offered reassurance on Friday that the SARS was not infectious enough to cause a world pandemic.

This virus is not highly infectious. It is a plodder like mumps, not a greyhound like measles," said John Oxford, professor of virology at Queen Mary School of Medicine in London.

With a "greyhound" virus, escaping infection is very difficult. But with plodder viruses, someone could walk 100 times into the same room as an infected person and still not be infected, he added in an interview.

If the SARS virus was highly infectious, there would have been many more cases than the few thousand so far reported in China. "I don't think there is any evidence of mutation," he said.

Oxford, an expert on the influenza virus, said SARS should certainly not be compared with the Spanish influenza pandemic that killed millions after the end of the first world war in 1918.

He said Chinese government measures, such as closing schools, to stop the virus spreading were "very positive" but the situation outside South East Asia was different and did not require special containment measures.