Hong Kong's schoolchildren begin to fall victim to killer flu

The killer pneumonia virus from the East is spreading to children. In Hong Kong, the Health Minister, Yeoh Eng-Kiong, said six were infected in the territory, one school had been shut and three others would be disinfected over the weekend.

All the children were believed to have been infected by family members working in hospitals, but children typically have much closer contact with each other than adults, increasing the risks of the illness spreading in schools.

Anxious parents have begun sending them to school in surgical masks and have called schools demanding to know what safety measures were being taken. The Government said it would shut any school for disinfection if the virus was confirmed among its children. One mother, Olivia Lo, said: "Now that it is in schools, this may just explode. Schools are so congested and children don't know how to take precautions. If they even suspect an infection, they must close the schools."

The World Health Organisation said yesterday it was sending a team to Beijing to investigate. "We are globally worried, and we're worried about what's happening in China as well," Henk Bekedam, a WHO representative in Beijing, said. "We know there are cases still here." In Britain, there was confusion over the number of people infected with the illness, known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), after the first man to be identified as a "probable" case turned out not to have it.

Nigel Glassey, 64, a solicitor who returned from a visit to his daughter in Hong Kong last weekend, was admitted to North Manchester Hospital with signs of the infection. But doctors said yesterday he was suffering from Asian flu and would be transferred from the isolation unit to a side ward. "He is out of the woods," a spokeswoman said.

In Birmingham, a man who developed symptoms of the infection after returning from China a week ago was admitted to the isolation unit of Heartlands Hospital on Thursday night. A further probable case is being treated at the Royal Free Hospital in London and a suspected case is being monitored in Wales.

The World Health Organisation said 10 people had died of the infection – six in Hong Kong, two in Canada and two in Vietnam. Five people died last year in China in another outbreak.

Suspected cases have been reported in 10 countries but the Far East remains the hardest hit. In Hong Kong there were 173 people sick, 165 of them in a critical condition, Mr Yeoh said. Hong Kong officials believe a Chinese doctor visiting from the Guangdong province in southern China passed the virus to seven other guests on the same floor of a hotel in Hong Kong before he died. They then infected staff in hospitals in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vietnam. The doctor was said to be ill when he arrived.

"Eighty per cent of the infections in Hong Kong can be traced to that one person," Mr Yeoh said.