This article is devoted to the analysis of a particle system model for epidemics among a finite population with susceptible, infective and removed individuals (SIR). The infection mechanism depends on the relative distance between susceptibles and infected so that an infected individual is more likely to infect nearby sites than those further away. For fixed time, we prove that the density fields weakly converge to the solution of a PDE's system, as the number of particles increases. We find an implicit expression for the final survivor density of the limit equation and we analyze the asymptotics of the microscopic system, by taking first the time and after the number of particles to infinity, showing a critical behaviour for some values of the parameters when the system is set in the mean field regime.