Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia ? Health officials from across Asia came up with a joint plan Saturday to fight SARS with tighter screening of travelers, while a health minister blamed for China’s slow response to the outbreak there was replaced.

“We must use every weapon at our disposal,” the regional director of the World Health Organization, Shigeru Omi, told health ministers and senior officials from Southeast Asia, China, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.

The health ministers approved a plan to boost screening at international departure points, bar travelers with SARS symptoms and require health forms for visitors from affected countries.

The worldwide spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, has been blamed on travelers in Asia, particularly in Hong Kong and southern China, where the flu-like disease emerged last fall.

“Should SARS continue to spread, the global economic consequences could be great in a closely interconnected and interdependent world,” Malaysian Health Minister Chua Jui Meng said.

Chua said the measures approved by the ministers would be presented to national leaders at a summit next week before being enacted formally.

In China, Health Minister Zhang Wenkang resigned Saturday and parliament assigned his duties to Vice Premier Wu Yi, the government said. Wu, China’s highest-ranking woman, is a respected former trade envoy and already was the top official in charge of health care.

Zhang’s replacement came amid increasingly drastic steps to contain SARS, including the quarantine of thousands of people and, early today, officials shut down all theaters, cinemas other places of entertainment in Beijing in an effort to curb the spread of the disease.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the length of the closures would depend on progress made in combatting severe acute respiratory syndrome, which has killed at least 42 people and sickened 988 in Beijing.

Elsewhere, Hong Kong health officials reported 17 new cases of SARS infections Saturday, the lowest daily figure this month, but they said it was too early to know whether the disease was coming under control. For more than a week, the daily number of new cases had been between 20 and 30.

India reported its fifth case of SARS on Saturday, further raising fears the disease could spread swiftly among the country’s more than 1 billion people, most of whom have inadequate health care.

The World Health Organization confirmed it was reconsidering the travel warning it issued last week for Toronto, where SARS claimed a 20th Canadian victim Saturday.

Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is the epicenter of the biggest outbreak of SARS outside of Asia.