Quarantine ended on Monday evening for the 38 people who were exposed to the mainland's second confirmed A/H1N1 influenza case in the eastern Shandong Province, a government spokesman said.

The 38, including 35 passengers and three crew members who had close contacts with flu patient surnamed Lu in the same car of train D41 from Beijing to Shandong's capital Jinan on May 11, didn't show any symptom of being infected during the seven days in quarantine, said Li Zhongjun, spokesman of the Shandong provincial health department.

Thirty of the quarantined stayed in Shandong, six were in Beijing, one in Hong Kong and one in Guangxi, he said.

Quarantine was lifted for them at 10:35 PM, the time of the train's arrival in Jinan.

Medical workers are still trying to find eight others who were in the same train car, said Zhang Ji, head of the Jinan City center of disease control and prevention.

The second confirmed patient, who was only identified by his surname as Lu, is expected to be discharged from the Infectious Disease Hospital in Jinan on Tuesday morning if everything goes smoothly, according to Li.

Lu made an apology during a telephone interview with Xinhua to those quarantined for his sake.

"I am sorry," he said. "It interrupted your normal life."

Lu was criticized for going to many public places after developing flu symptoms and exposing people to the disease.

He said, "I just finished my middle school study in Canada and am about to enter a college there, so the time staying in China is valuable."

"We wanted to go sightseeing and shopping in Beijing, but at that time, I really didn't know I was infected with A/H1N1," he added.

Lu's father also made a public apology Sunday at a local television station, saying his family was sorry that Lu's illness had led to the quarantine of so many people and so much government spending.

"I hope that I could live in peace after returning home, away from media and other people to be an ordinary person," Lu said.

Also on Monday, quarantine was lifted for 13 people in the northern Hebei Province who had close contacts with the A/H1N1 flu patients.

China has three confirmed cases of A/H1N1 flu on the mainland and one suspected case.

Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Monday announced that it has successfully segregated a strain of the A/H1N1 influenza virus and captured its genome sequence.

The virus strain was segregated from physical samples of Chinese mainland's first confirmed A/H1N1 influenza human case which was identified in Sichuan Province.

The CDC acquired the first domestically-generated virus strain on May 17, one week after it received the patient's samples, and completed the genome sequence test on Monday.

Shu Yuelong, director of the Chinese National Influenza Center based in the CDC, said that the research on the strain obtained from the mainland's first human case proved that the virus has not mutated from the kind found in donated viruses.

China has received some donated viruses from the United States and Hong Kong after the influenza's outbreak in some countries and regions worldwide for medical analysis.

Shu promised that China would share the information about the virus strains with other researchers in the world.

(Xinhua News Agency May 19, 2009)