Taiwanese TB globe trotters back home

Jul 31 2007

In another case of globe trotting tuberculosis (TB) air travelers, a couple from Taiwan are now back home.

According to Chinese officials, the pair who defied a flight ban and flew to mainland China via Hong Kong have returned to Taiwan, but it is unclear how or when the couple traveled back to Taiwan or where they are in Taiwan.

The husband and wife apparently left China's eastern Jiangsu province on Sunday in a special ambulance after checks showed their condition allowed them to travel and they stayed in a hospital in southeastern Fujian province overnight.

Both are infectious, the 55-year-old husband has multidrug-resistant TB, which is hard to treat while his wife, aged 57, has standard TB, which is easier to cure.

Jiangsu's Disease Control and Prevention Center says it has disinfected all the places where the couple had stayed in Jiangsu and tested those who had close contact with the couple, and found no signs of infection.

The couple flew from the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung to Hong Kong and from Hong Kong to Nanjing in eastern China on Dragon Air flight KA810 on July 21st to attend a relative's wedding in Nanjing.

China's Health Ministry has warned passengers on the Dragon Air flight to undergo medical tests.

They then carried on and toured 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.

The case has echoes of that of U.S. lawyer Andrew Speaker who triggered an international panic in May by fleeing across Europe with what was then thought to be a very dangerous, extensively drug-resistant form of TB.

Authorities in Taiwan and Hong Kong have reassured passengers on the two earlier 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.

World Health Organization guidelines say the risk of infection appears to be associated to flights lasting more than eight hours.

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