TB patients to be brought back to Taiwan -CDC

HONG KONG, July 30 (Reuters) Two Taiwan tuberculosis patients who defied a flight ban and flew to mainland China via Hong Kong will be brought back to Taiwan for treatment, Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control said today.

The couple are infectious and the 55-year-old husband has multidrug-resistant TB, which is hard to treat. The wife, 57, has standard TB, which is easier to cure.

They flew from the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung to Hong Kong and then from Hong Kong to Nanjing in eastern China on July 21.

Chinese authorities managed to track them down in the eastern province of Jiangsu last Friday.

Taiwan's Centres for Disease Control said the couple will return to Taiwan for treatment, but gave no details on how or when they will be taken back to Taiwan, citing privacy reasons.

''The Taiwan CDC will oversee the transportation of the two patients ... without causing (any) public health scare. As soon as the TB patients arrive in Taiwan, (they will) resume their treatment at a hospital dedicated primarily to the cure of TB,'' the Taiwan CDC statement said.

The couple attended a relative's wedding after arriving in Nanjing. They then went on a tour with their son, his girlfriend and the girl's parents in China's eastern Jiangsu province, including the cities of Zhenjiang, Suzhou and Yancheng, before they were tracked down by Chinese authorities in Funing.

Authorities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, however, have reassured passengers on the two flights that the probability of their being infected by the couple was ''almost nil'', because neither of the two flights lasted more than eight hours.

Citing World Health Organisation guidelines, a spokeswoman for Hong Kong's Health Department said the risk of infection appears to be associated to flights lasting more than eight hours.

Still, authorities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China are trying to hunt down passengers who sat near the couple on the flights.

Taiwan prohibits people with multi-drug resistant tuberculosis from any air travel and those who flout the rules can be fined T150,000 dollar (US4,560 dollar).

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 SW BD1325