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Following is a transcript of the remarks made by the Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr Yeoh Eng-kiong, at a stand-up media session on the latest situation of pneumonia cases at the Central Government Offices today (March 15):
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: Today, I just want to update you on the position relating to this very specific grouping or clustering of cases of atypical pneumonia which have a predisposition to affect health care workers who have been taking care of patients and their immediate relatives. Compared to yesterday, we now have under observation 47 patients. Yesterday, there were 43. There were additional four cases. Among these four cases, three of them come from an additional cluster. That cluster is the GP -- the doctor in general practice and the two nurses who have seen a patient with pneumonia. They have now been included because we believe they may belong to the same category. So we now have 47. Another patient was one of the health care personnel belonging to the Pamela Youde Eastern Hospital Cluster. Remember yesterday there were five health care personnel from the Pamela Youde Hospital Cluster. There is one additional individual who has fallen sick. In terms of pneumonia, we now have an additional eight patients with pneumonia. Remember the 47 are under observation. Whether they have pneumonia or not, we don't know because we are still waiting to observe them. There are now 37 patients with pneumonia. So there are eight new pneumonia patients. Four of them are staff of the Prince of Wales Hospital. There has been no increase in the number of health care personnel found to be sick and admitted to the Prince of Wales Hospital. So the number has stablised. In Prince of Wales Hospital, there were 34 health care personnel yesterday who were admitted to the hospital for observation. Those numbers remain the same. Of the 34, four have now developed pneumonia. So there are 24. There are two who are critical and the others are in stable condition. And of the other pneumonia cases, one is of course in the Pamela Youde Eastern Hospital. Three of the other cases were the clinic doctor in the private sector. So this accounts for all the eight cases of pneumonia.
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: As far as we know, we now have four clusters of cases. We have the Prince of Wales Hospital cluster. We have the Pamela Youde Eastern Hospital cluster. We have the Kwong Wah Hospital cluster. And then we have a fourth cluster which is the clinic in the private sector, the private clinic cluster. These are the four clusters we are looking at. We can give you the details of the figures later so that you are clear about the numbers. But it's very important to re-group these figures so that we see what is actually happening in each cluster. Because when you have a cluster of patients, you would imagine that there will be continuing cases because you talk about incubation periods of between two to seven days. So once you identify patients in the cluster, you have to wait, as one of our clinic physicians this morning said. Usually we wait for about two weeks, twice the duration of the incubation period before we say that there will be no new cases. It's very important for each cluster to be identified separately so we know where the tail end up of this outbreak in that cluster would be. So we now have four clusters which we are watching separately. It's also very important that we identify clusters because we are not really interested in background atypical pneumonia. We are interested in a very specific subset of atypical pneumonia that seems to have predilection to affect health care workers and very close relatives. These are the numbers we have today. If you need clarification, I can clarify one or two of the points. The detailed figures will be handed out today.
Obviously the Department of Health is continuing to do its surveillance work and we have found no features at the moment that suggest any spread in the community. The Hospital Authority is continuing its infection control procedures in the hospitals to limit the numbers from increasing in each cluster. We are looking at a variety of measures. The first thing is, if you have a suspected case, then you want to make sure that you identify the context. And then if the people are sick, you take care of them so that (the diseases) don't spread to other part of the community. So the limit to spread is one cluster. The other infection control procedure the Hospital Authority is doing is that there may be one or two individuals in the community that may carry the virus we don't know. Obviously we need to take measures so that when health care personnel are dealing with very sick patients with atypical pneumonia, if there are cases started in the community, we minimise the chances of getting another cluster. So this is what we are looking at. We are looking at infection control procedures and surveillance system. First is to make sure that if there is a cluster, we minimise the number that will grow from them. The second is to minimise other chances of other clusters developing. And the third, in the overall community, to make sure that there is no spread of infection in the community. So this is the work the Hospital Authority and the Department of Health are doing.I also want to say in fact there have been some reports from countries in the region to warn their citizens not to come to Hong Kong because of atypical pneumonia. We have in fact through the tourism departments inform the consul generals, to tell them the situation because we believe that with the right information, people will not be scared, and will not take unnecessary action not to come to Hong Kong because Hong Kong is actually safe at the moment. It is no different from going to any big cities in the world because there is certainly no evidence to say Hong Kong has an outbreak of atypical pneumonia in the community. What we see is a very special situation of clusters of atypical pneumonia in health care personnel taking care of patients with atypical pneumonia and some clusters include the relatives of these individuals.
This is the phenomenon and we are very happy to share all our information with the consul general. In fact, we will invite the consul generals next week to brief them on the total situation so that they have all the facts and people can make informed choices of whether Hong Kong is safe or not. As far as we are concerned, we think Hong Kong is absolutely safe and no different from any other big cities in the world. I think the problem is of course there is a lot of background atypical pneumonia in any community as I said yesterday. In many communities, half of the pneumonias are caused by identifiable organisms such as bacteria, and the other half usually includes viruses and other agents that we do not know of and Hong Kong is no different. You can get atypical pneumonia anywhere in the world. It is quite unfortunate that when people report cases, they lump everything together. I know the reports in Toronto relating to individuals who came back from Hong Kong and then developed pneumonia and reportedly two patients died. And we also have cases of people coming from Singapore who then went back to Singapore and reported pneumonia and then also spread to health care workers. These occur in all types of known atypical pneumonia. What we are very interested in is a very unique type of atypical pneumonia which gives concern that there is a new agent. In fact, I will call upon the World Health Organisation (WHO) to do a more clearer definition of what they said they are trying to look for so that there is no confusion in the international community, and for WHO to also collect data on the clinical features of these cases so that we can better understand this phenomenon that we are seeing in Hong Kong and reportedly in Vietnam and Southern China. It is very important to define clearer what is it we are looking for. Otherwise, it will cause a lot of confusion and worry in the international community. This is the current situation.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)
End/Saturday, March 15, 2003
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