Doctors in southern China are examining a man with SARS symptoms as neighbouring Hong Kong steps up health checks on travellers to avert another outbreak of the deadly virus ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday.
China's first suspected Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome patient since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the world SARS-free in July was in hospital in the southern province of Guangdong where the disease first emerged in late 2002.
"We have heard from a hospital that there is a suspected SARS patient in Guangdong. He is a man and he is not a medical worker," a provincial health bureau official told Reuters by telephone on Saturday.
Hong Kong Health Director Lam Ping-yan identified the patient as a freelance television station worker from booming Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province which borders Hong Kong.
"The patient and those who have close contact with him are now being isolated and samples are being tested in the laboratory," Xinhua quoted Lam as saying, adding that the patient had not travelled outside China recently.
WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley said the patient was a 32-year-old television journalist.
"They told us what we still think to be the case. That they had a suspected SARS case in a hospital in Guangzhou, that he developed classical SARS symptoms like a headache and fever on December 16," Cordingley told Reuters from Manila.
"We're treating it as a suspected SARS case. It does not yet match our lab definitions of SARS. We're waiting for the results of further tests."
Global health officials have been nervously watching for a resurgence of SARS, which is spread by travellers, since the start of the northern winter. Two recent cases in Singapore and Taiwan were linked to accidents in medical research laboratories.
An official from the national health ministry in Beijing told Reuters he had been informed of the suspected case but could not yet confirm that the man was suffering from SARS.
Xinhua news agency said the patient was first diagnosed on December 16 with pneumonia of the right lower lung and quarantined for treatment. He was transferred to the quarantine ward of Guangzhou No. 8 People's Hospital on December 24. It said he was receiving "further medical checks and group consultations".
Xinhua, in its daily report on SARS, acknowledged the suspected case and gave its usual line: "There has been no report of SARS cases in the last 24 hours."
The Chinese territory of Hong Kong, a former British colony and hub for global travellers, stepped up health checks on visitors from southern China after being notified of the suspected case on Friday evening.
News of the possible new SARS case comes just weeks before the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday when there is a mass migration from China and Hong Kong overseas.
"Hong Kong will feel terrible," Beijing resident Hou Nan, 36, told Reuters. "It is sandwiched between Guangdong and Taiwan, which had one case early this month, and the New Year is just around the corner."
If confirmed, the Guangdong case would be the first not linked to laboratory accidents since the WHO made its declaration in July.
China has been on high alert for months amid fears the illness which ravaged many Asian economies and killed around 800 people worldwide might make a comeback this winter.