An infected medical professor from Guangdong Province apparently carried a mysterious flu-like disease to a Hong Kong hotel //where// six other guests contracted the illness, including one who later died in Canada, Hong Kong health officials said yesterday.

　　The case of the medical professor, who also died from the illness, bolsters suspicions of a link between recent cases worldwide and an earlier outbreak in Guangdong,swheresan illness killed five people and sickened more than 300.

　　Meanwhile, Hong Kong officials announced yesterday that the professor's brother-in-law had also died, becoming the sixth person killed in Hong Kong by the disease.

　　It is not certain how the people who became ill at Hong Kong's Metropole Hotel caught the illness, although some experts suggested it was an airborne transmission.

　　The Guangdong professor's brother-in-law, who died on Wednesday and became Hong Kong's sixth fatality in the outbreak, had not stayed at the Metropole, but he had dined with the professor, officials said.

　　Two other members of the family, the professor's wife and a sister, were treated for fever or pneumonia and have recovered and been discharged, said Dr Tse Lai-yin, a consultant in charge of the Health Department's Disease Prevention and Control Division.

　　Officials have said most cases involved health-care workers and relatives who had close contact with victims, but the spread to the hotel guests does not fit that pattern.

　　The Guangdong professor died in Hong Kong on March 4, after being hospitalized February 22, and another hotel guest, a 78-year-old woman from Toronto, died after returning to Canada, Hong Kong officials said.

　　The others who came down with the disease after visiting the Metropole had all either visited or stayed on its ninth floor between February 12 and March 2, said the Hong Kong Health Department director, Dr Margaret Chan.

　　They included three Singaporean women who were hotel guests, a man from Canada who was a guest and a Hong Kong man who went to the Metropole to visit a friend.

　　"Perhaps they all stood out-side the elevator at the same time and someone sneezed or coughed," she said.

　　Others weren't so sure.

　　"It would suggest that it spread through the air-conditioning system, but you can't rule out person-to-person contact, since you don't know if they were even in the same room together," said Ronald Atlas, president of the American Society of Microbiology. "But everything says it is airborne."

　　The Hong Kong man who visited the Metropole has been identified as the "index patient" who spread the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, to Hong Kong's Prince of Wales Hospital,swheresdozens of workers have been sickened, said Health Department spokeswoman Sally Kong.

　　None of the 200 to 300 workers at the hotel has become ill and although conditions seem safe there now, the ninth floor has been closed to be sterilized, Chan said.