A SARS-like virus that has spread across China and reached three other Asian nations is contagious between humans, a government expert said Monday, and the World Health Organisation announced that a key emergency committee would meet this week to discuss the infections.
The new coronavirus strain, first discovered in the central city of Wuhan, has caused alarm because of its connection to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed nearly 650 people across mainland China and Hong Kong in 2002-2003.
The total number of people diagnosed with the new virus has risen to 218.
Beijing and Shanghai confirmed their first cases on Monday while more than a dozen more emerged in southern Guangdong province and 136 new ones were found over the weekend in Wuhan, according to state broadcaster CCTV.
A third person died in Wuhan, the local health commission said.
Scientists have scrambled to determine the mode of transmission, with a seafood market in Wuhan believed to be the centre of the outbreak.
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But Zhong Nanshan, a renowned scientist at the National Health Commission who helped expose the scale of the SARS outbreak, said patients could contract the new virus without having visited the city.
"Currently, it can be said it is affirmative that there is the phenomenon of human-to-human transmission," he said in an interview with CCTV.
In Guangdong, two patients were infected by family members who visited Wuhan, Zhong explained.
Fourteen medical personnel helping with coronavirus patients have also been infected, he said, though he added that more than 95 of the total cases were related to Wuhan.
Zhong predicted an increase of viral pneumonia cases during the Lunar New Year holiday -- when millions travel in China -- but expressed confidence in curbing the spread of the virus, China's official Xinhua news agency reported.
The World Health Organisation panel will meet in Geneva on Wednesday to determine whether to declare the outbreak "a public health emergency of international concern" -- a rare designation only used for the gravest epidemics.
WHO said earlier that an animal source seemed to be "the most likely primary source" with "some limited human-to-human transmission occurring between close contacts."
The WHO said the new cases in China were the result of "increased searching and testing for (the virus) among people sick with respiratory illness."
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