Press Releases

Transcript of Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food

Following is a transcript of the remarks made by the Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr Yeoh Eng-kiong, to the media concerning the lifting of travel advisory by the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention at the Central Government Offices (West Wing) today (June 5):

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: I just want to say that our discussions with the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Prevention started two weeks ago when we contacted the Director of Disease, Dr Julie Gerberding, in relation to the travel advisory that the CDC gives to American citizens on travel advice to Hong Kong. We brought this up in the videoconferencing on Tuesday, two days ago. We went into great details in the videoconference to explain our strategy in controlling the epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong. Of course, we told them about the four strategies that we were implementing and adopted in terms of early detection, swift contact tracing, early isolation and quarantine, and effective containment and that we had effectively reduced the number of cases of SARS in less than five in the last three weeks. We also told them about our contact tracing and surveillance system where we were able to link up each and every case of SARS to a possible source of infection. Of course, the recognition of the CDC and the WHO in lifting their advisory confirms the international confidence in our system in containing SARS. I also want to take this opportunity to say that obviously even with this lifting of travel advisory, we in government, and also the Hong Kong community, should not let off our guard. I was just saying that in the context of our continuing preventive measures, there is still a lot of work to do because we cannot exclude the possibility of the virus coming back again later during the year especially in winter. Obviously with our control measures, we are much more confident because we are more knowledgeable about the virus and how it is spread. So we obviously have confidence in our system that enable us to detect cases earlier on. We certainly do not hope that there would be any outbreaks that we've seen in the past particularly in the context of Amoy Gardens because we now know about the environmental factors that may lead to the spread of SARS. Because of our measures, we should be able to prevent that. Obviously we cannot exclude the possibility of mutation of virus, changes in its behaviors, that could lead large outbreaks but balance those, we should be able to control the situation.

In the measures that we are adopting, we are also looking towards the possibility of enhancing our infection control facilities in hospitals. We look at three options. One is to build a new infectious disease hospital. The second is to increase the infectious disease facilities in existing hospitals and the third is to build temporary isolation facilities. So these are the options that we are considering. Obviously some of the options will take a longer time because actually we need to build new buildings. So in the short term to prepare ourselves better for any resurgence of SARS, we are looking to improving the ventilation system in our public hospitals, improving the isolation facilities in the present hospitals and we hope that some of these can be implemented in a couple of months. So we are looking at short term and longer term measures. And in the longer term measures, I just want to emphasise that in fact we are not looking towards just providing us the facilities for treating SARS but for any other infectious diseases that we may unfortunately encounter in the future. So we are looking at all different options.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)

End/Thursday, June 5, 2003
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