HONG KONG: In Hong Kong, two people have been diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) after being in contact with a British woman who died from the disease recently.

The city's health authority has managed to trace more than 300 people believed to have been in contact with her.

However, its infectious diseases unit does not believe the latest incident poses a public health risk.

29-year-old Clare Lennon, who taught at a Hong Kong primary school, was treated for persistent coughing at St Paul's Hospital between April 10 and 15.

Initial tests proved negative for tuberculosis (TB). She later took a plane back to England where she died on April 24.

Since then, Hong Kong's health department has traced all 328 people who had physical contact with her, mostly her students and colleagues at school and the passengers on the flight she had boarded.

Dr Thomas Tsang, Controller, Centre for Health Protection, said: "The two cases which we discovered on contact-tracing have been put on TB-treatment and they're doing fine and recovering very well.

"And I think now that the patient has already left Hong Kong and we have conducted a very thorough contact-tracing investigation, the risk in terms of that patient is no longer there."

St Paul's Hospital, which treated her, has come under fire for alerting the authorities ten days after she was found to have tested positive for TB. This was a considerable delay from the time the hospital learnt about the test results.

British health authorities are still trying to ascertain the woman's cause of death. Apart from TB, she had also been diagnosed with lymphoma, a cancer. It is also not known where she caught the TB from.

In the past two years, there has been an average of around 5,700 cases of TB in Hong Kong, out of a population of nearly seven million. - CNA/vm