British and Hong Kong health authorities are urgently tracing people who came into contact with a woman who died of TB after flying home from the Chinese city, a newspaper reported on Sunday.
Clare Lennon, 29, died in a hospital in southwest England on April 24, seven days after boarding a Cathay Pacific plane from Hong Kong to London, according to a report in the South China Morning Post.
British and Hong Kong authorities believe that as many as 328 people who had come into close contact with Lennon could be at risk, the report said.
They included school children and teachers in the Hong Kong school she taught at and passengers on flight CX257 to London on April 17.
One of her friends in Hong Kong has already been diagnosed with tuberculosis, according to the report.
The Hong Kong government was unable to tell AFP how many people it had managed to trace by Sunday noon.
The incident has sparked an investigation into the city's St Paul's Hospital, which treated Lennon from April 10 to 15, after it later confirmed she had TB but did not immediately tell health authorities.
A spokeswoman for the hospital told AFP on Sunday: "We have already reported all relevant information to the Department of Health. We are unable to give further details of the case until Monday."
A friend of Lennon's told the newspaper the deceased had been coughing for weeks and had lost a lot of weight before being admitted to the hospital.
The number of reported tuberculosis cases dropped from 5,856 to 5,545 between 2006 and 2007 in Hong Kong, a city with a population of 6.9 million, official figures showed.
© 2008 AFP
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