Sick child triggers killer flu scare on jet flight

By ANGELA GREGORY AND NZPA

Passengers were shifted away from a Japanese family on a flight from Hong Kong to Auckland after a sick toddler showed symptoms of a virus which has killed people overseas.

The 3 1/2-year-old was later cleared of the disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome, at Middlemore Hospital yesterday.

It was yet another false alarm in New Zealand over the virus which is keeping airports, airlines and hospitals on high alert.

Four more people died in Asia yesterday from the pneumonia virus, bringing the death toll worldwide to at least 22, and Hong Kong's hospital chief was taken ill with symptoms of the disease.

A nurse and a doctor died in Vietnam and at least two people succumbed in Hong Kong.

Singapore said it would quarantine more than 700 people in a bid to contain the illness.

The virus appeared in southern China late last year, and has been spread swiftly around the world by air travellers, infecting hundreds in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada and Germany.

Suspected cases have been reported in the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

Cathay Pacific management said yesterday the child, on flight CX107 from Hong Kong to Auckland, had a fever.

Airline marketing services manager Ian Herald said the child's family, who stopped over in the Hong Kong international airport for an hour, were separated from the other passengers on the flight.

The airline alerted health authorities in Auckland and the child was taken by ambulance to Middlemore Hospital, but cleared and discharged shortly afterwards, he said.

"It seems the child is prone to tonsillitis," Mr Herald said.

Passengers on board the Cathay Pacific flight appeared largely unconcerned by the scare.

Steinar Krokstad, of Norway, said he had not been concerned and decided against wearing a mask.

"The captain just asked us to stay put until the health authorities boarded and took the family off."

A Hungarian couple said the family and flight attendants were wearing masks to stop any risk of contamination through the plane.

But Ida Friis Nielsen, of Denmark, was worried about the risk of contracting the virus, as she was sitting quite close to the sick child.

The Ministry of Health said there had been a number of false alarms, but New Zealand did not have any cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

A woman suspected of having the virus was discharged from Auckland Hospital on Monday.

A spokeswoman said it was now considered unlikely that the woman had it as she had responded well to antibiotics.

United States public health officials now think a mutated killer cousin of the common cold may be behind the strange new respiratory disease.

The US Centres for Disease Control said different types of viral tests indicated it was a never-before-seen member of the coronavirus family. No cure existed for coronaviruses, so named because their shape resembles a crown.

The surprising development has caught coronavirus experts by surprise and contradicted the leading theory of international health experts, who believed severe acute respiratory syndrome was related to mumps and measles.

Over roughly the past six weeks, the virus has been spread from its beginnings in a rural Chinese province by droplets from sneezes.

As of Monday, 458 people were infected.

A microbiology professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, David Brian, said that if it turned out to be a coronavirus causing the disease, controlling it would be a challenge.

"It's a respiratory virus that spreads easily," he said.

"How are you going to control it?"