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HONG KONG: Hong Kong health officials said Sunday they were testing 10 more suspected cases of Influenza A (H1N1), as the search for anyone who may have come into contact with the city's only positive case continued.
Thomas Tsang, controller of the Centre for Health Protection (CHP), said 15 new cases of people with flu-like symptoms who have travelled to countries with confirmed H1N1 flu outbreaks had been tested since Saturday.
Five had been given the all-clear, while the others were undergoing further tests, Tsang told reporters.
The city was put on its highest health alert after a 25-year-old Mexican man was found to be carrying the A(H1N1) virus on Friday, the first confirmed case of the flu in Asia.
He remained in a stable condition Sunday, Tsang said, and there had been no other positive cases.
Around 300 guests and staff at a hotel where the Mexican stayed have been quarantined for seven days, but officials were still trying to trace a further 50 hotel guests who have not returned.
Tsang said the names of the missing guests have been passed to immigration officials in the southern Chinese city. "They will not be able to leave," he said.
In a bizarre twist, one of the two taxi drivers believed to have driven the Mexican before he went to hospital changed his story Sunday and said he had only pretended to be the driver in order to test the hotline system.
Gabriel Leung, the under secretary for food and health, said police were now investigating whether or not the man was the real taxi driver.
The other taxi driver has been placed in quarantine at a specially converted isolation camp, although he was not showing any flu symptoms, a CHP spokesman said earlier.
Hong Kong was the centre of the SARS outbreak in 2003, which killed nearly 300 people in the city and around 800 worldwide.
Some experts have criticised the decision to quarantine the hotel as an overreaction, but Yuen Kwok-yung, head of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong, defended the move.
"Scientifically, we need to be prudent because we don't know anything (about the threat of the flu," he told reporters at the government press conference.
Inside the hotel, guests were stoical about the seven-day detention, although there were some signs of frustration.
Kevin Ireland, an Indian buying agent, said one Korean man and an English couple had been upset, but he said he understood the move.
"It is better to be cautious," he told AFP by phone from inside the hotel.
The Mexican was admitted to hospital in Hong Kong on Thursday night after flying into the city from Mexico, via Shanghai. Around 30 passengers sitting close to him have all been traced.
He went to hospital suffering from a fever and tested positive on Friday for the flu virus. None of the latest suspected cases had any known contact with the Mexican, Tsang added.
- AFP/yt
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