Health authorities announced Saturday they have found the first suspected case of mad cow disease in Hong Kong, sparking fears that the deadly illness had finally spread here.

Director of Health Dr. Margaret Chan confirmed a media report that a man believed to have shown symptoms of the brain-wasting illness has been hospitalized, but did not identify him.

The patient has lived abroad for many years and sought medical treatment when he returned to Hong Kong at the beginning of this year, Chan told reporters at a press conference.

However, Chan said the patient had never donated blood--a possible means of spreading the disease--during his stay in Hong Kong and urged the public not to grow prematurely fearful of contagion as the territory has banned beef imports from Britain since 1996.

"I must stress that it is still a suspected case at this stage and the experts are still investigating," she said.

Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has killed about 80 Europeans since the mid-1990s, mostly in Britain.

Humans are believed to contract the illness by eating meat products from cattle with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease. It usually manifests itself in people in the form of depression, memory loss and dementia as the brain turns "spongy."

In the past years, mad cow and unrelated livestock disease foot-and-mouth have prompted many Asian countries to ban meat imports from European countries including Britain, France and Germany, devastating the farming industry there.

For more information on Mad Cow disease and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, try the Vidyya search page and key words "Mad Cow" or "Creutzfeldt-Jakob."