(Updates throughout, changes dateline, PVS TOKYO)
SHANGHAI, April 24 (Reuters) - Japanese carmaker Toyota denied on Thursday a media report it had ordered staff out of Beijing as SARS spreads across China, but said it was helping Japanese staff and families wishing to go home for holidays.
"We're not putting pressure on any of our employees. If they want to go back to Japan for the holidays, we'll help make things more convenient for them," said Sun Tuoya, a Toyota spokeswoman in Beijing.
"This policy extends to all our foreign resident staff in China, all 30-odd of them," she told Reuters ahead of a three-day May Day holiday in China.
SARS infections have soared in Beijing this week, sparking widespread alarm among its 14 million people and prompting the government to step up efforts to contain the disease by implementing a tough quarantine policy on SARS-hit areas.
Beijing has reported almost 800 SARS cases and 39 deaths, prompting the World Health Organisation to warn against travelling to the city.
Sun rejected a Kyodo news agency report that Toyota planned to withdraw most Japanese staff and their families from Beijing, keeping just one executive in the capital after a pullout expected to commence as early as Thursday.
"The plan right now is that they can stay home up till the end of the holidays on May 5. What happens next, we haven't made a decision yet," Sun said, declining to elaborate.
Honda Motor Co this month pulled its staff and their families out of hard-hit Hong Kong and Guangdong, the neighbouring southern Chinese province where Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) first appeared in November.
But Honda, Japan's second-largest automaker, said it had no plans to pull staff out of Beijing.
The flu-like SARS virus has killed about 250 worldwide and infected about 4,500 since surfacing in Guangdong late last year.