Transcript of Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food (1)

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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 press conference on the local treatment experience of severe acute respiratory syndrome and the clinical correlation of outcome today (April 19):

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: The purpose of this briefing is to give you the perspective of the whole treatment protocol for the treatment of patients with SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome). We'll be initially talking about the experiences on how we develop the treatment protocol because this is a very new infection where initially when we started treating patients, we didn't even know what was causing it. So, we have developed some empirical treatments and based on that experience we have now got quite a good protocol which gives response rate up to 95 per cent. Then we'll be talking about the factors that contributed to the effectiveness of the treatments because there are patients factors and virus factors which will distinguish which patient will respond better and which patient will not respond in the same way. We'll also be sharing with you the experiences that we have now that in our interactions with the Guangdong health authorities' experiences based on the interchange how we are going to adjust our treatment protocols. Finally, Professor Yuen (Kwok-yung) will be talking about the basis of our treatment and how we intend to enhance our treatment in the future. So, perhaps I'll start with Professor (Joseph) Sung.

(to be continued)

End/Saturday, April 19, 2003

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