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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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