China tracks down missing Taiwan TB patients

TAIPEI/SHANGHAI, July 28 (Reuters) China has tracked down two Taiwanese tuberculosis patients who defied a flight ban, Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control said today.

The patients, a 55-year-old man suffering a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis and his 57-year-old wife who has standard tuberculosis and is infectious, were found in the eastern province of Jiangsu yesterday, the CDC and China's official Xinhua news agency said.

The couple, who took a flight from the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung to Hong Kong and then boarded a plane to Nanjing in mainland China on Wednesday, have been transferred to hospital, Xinhua quoted China's Ministry of Health as saying.

Health authorities in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China launched a hunt for the couple and passengers who sat near them on the flights.

''The family members of these patients have been uncooperative, providing inconsistent information regarding the patients whereabouts, and later proved to be misleading,'' Taiwan's CDC said in a statement on its Web site www.cdc.gov.tw/en.

''Therefore, they will be subjected to legal liabilities in view of the aforementioned,'' said the CDC.

Xinhua did not say why the couple had broken rules against air travel for infectious tuberculosis patients, but Taiwanese officials said earlier that the man and wife had gone to stay with relatives in Nanjing.

Taiwan prohibits people with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis from any air travel and those who flout the rules can be fined 4,560 dollars.

The couple's flight comes after a US lawyer set off international alarms in May for fleeing across borders when he was thought to be infected with the most dangerous form of TB, or extensively drug-resistant TB, which is extremely difficult to treat.

TB is a highly infectious disease that is spread by coughing and sneezing. It kills about 1.6 million people a year.

One in three people worldwide is infected with dormant TB bacteria but it is only when a person's immunity is low that the TB bacteria becomes active and symptoms show.

REUTERS SKB RAI1125