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, at a media session after visiting two residential care homes for the elderly (RCHEs) in Tseung Kwan O today (August 20):

Reporter: Dr Yeoh, can you comment on the case in Canada? But before you do that, do you know there are a lot of people from the mainland coming to HK, and if there is a outbreak of SARS in the coming months, would the government of HK have a political will to restrict freedom of movement between HK and mainland travellers?

Dr Yeoh: In the context of the Canadian report in British Columbia, there was a report going out and we were alerted by the WHO (World Health Organisation) and by an alert from the Canadian government that of the 142 residents in one of the long stay facilities, 97 residents came down with respiratory illness and 46 staff also came down with the illness. Obviously, those figures are changing because they need to be updated. And this is a very high attack rate. But what was peculiar about the outbreak according to the reports that we have is that the symptoms tend to be quite mild. They tended to be having coughs, running nose, and more upper respiratory illnesses that approximate 10 per cent of the people who came down with the symptoms had fever. Although there were seven residents who died, from the report from the Canadian government, four died from other causes, three died with pneumonia. Ten of the residents had coronavirus in the 12 specimens that the Canadian government received where these specimen had shown there was evidence of coronavirus infection. So it appears that this may be some form of coronavirus infection. Whether it is a variant of the coronavirus caused in SARS we don't know because the studies are ongoing and the WHO has sent a team to really try to find out the nature of this outbreak.

Of course, we are alerted to that potential danger and I have been in contact with the Department of Health. I've spoken to the director to see what we need to add to, enhance our surveillance. First obviously we need to look at our system to see what we need to have in place so that if there are some of these unusual patterns arising, we are alerted to it in the first instance. So we need to have surveillance systems in nursing homes, in hospitals, in the clinics, etc. In fact, we have been discussing this the last two weeks because as part of the ongoing work of our review, we have already initiated the review of the surveillance system. But in the light of this Canadian outbreak, we'll be looking at it again. We also look towards in terms of our border points, whether we need to have additional elements to look at people coming to Hong Kong from areas with potential outbreaks, whether our present measures are sufficient. So it's in the context of what you said about increasing people flow. It is a question of where these new cases or SARS it is going to be re-introduced from. One, of course, is that the possible resurgence of this could be from the mainland because of the putative source which is in wild animals so that is one possible area. This case in British Columbia does alert us to that there may be other variants, that the introduction may not be necessarily from the mainland. We need to be alerted that it could be reintroduced sometimes indirectly from other places and we need to do a risk assessment to see which are the areas of surveillance that we need to step up. So that if anything happens, we'll be able to detect things at the earliest possible time so that the measures or containment could be done right away.

Reporter: (inaudible)

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: The scanners are already in place. So, everyone who is coming through the border is already scanned. And everyone has health declaration already. So, those are already in place. I think we need to look at what additional measures need to be put in place, where to put in, whether there are specific targets at certain points. At the moment, the additional risk is this reporting from British Columbia. So, we are examining the context in terms of our measures to see whether there are other appropriate measures to be put in and I have discussed this with the Director of Health and will be coming up with very specific proposals very soon. It must be done very soon and we will come up with those proposals in the next one or two days.

Reporter: (inaudible)

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: We will talk about these when they are firmed up. The things that we need to do, we need to look at, the first one is of course the border checks. The second will be our surveillance systems because the border check are only one element of the whole equation. It is only at one point in time, those in itself is only one component of the whole surveillance system. So, we need to look at the whole surveillance system because people can still, as you know, people who have fever may be missed by the thermal scan either because they take some antiparasitic or may happen that when they are passing through the checks that they do not have fever because when people have fever it is when they start having the illness. Of course, we know among the elderly, a proportion of people with SARS did not have fever. So, temperature check is only one element. The health card, the health declaration is the other component. In the experience of SARS, the health declaration did generate quite a lot of people who honestly told us they are sick. In the health declaration, eventually, we pick up two patients who were later confirmed to have SARS. So, it is the whole context of the total package which is important. Because the thermal detecting machines are already there at all the border control points but those by themselves is not sufficient.

Reporter: (inaudible)

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: First, when they used the thermal scan, we'll check the temperature again because thermal scan is the first level of protection and then we check temperatures using the thermometers to confirm it. And then they are assessed by port health officers, the medical officers to really see whether they have problem. Our agreement with Guangdong is for the individuals to be repatriated, this is one way. For the others, we can refer the patients to our clinics for assessment because with the infectious disease ordinance which we changed during the height of the SARS epidemic, we have the authority if a person is suspected to have SARS, the Director of Health can direct the individual to a facility to be assessed to see whether the patient has SARS or not. So, there are powers of direction of an individual to be examined and to be treated with our infectious disease law.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)

End/Wednesday, August 20, 2003
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