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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 after officiating at the SARS Clinical Management Workshop today (June 13):
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: As you know, this is the workshop on clinical management of SARS, which we are working with the World Health Organisation (WHO), to co-host it. The workshop is in three parts. The first part this morning was mainly on the clinical manifestation and prognostic of SARS. The second part will be in this afternoon, we will be looking at the clinical management of SARS patients. The third part will be tomorrow when we'll be looking at the infection risk and hospital infection control procedures. So, these are the three parts of the workshop. After the discussions in the three parts, there'll be a consensus statement developed where we will be looking at the experiences of the various countries and places in the clinical management of SARS; and this will provide a review and recommendations on how we could better manage the clinical practice of SARS patients in the future.
In this morning, the presentations, as you know, came from Hong Kong, other parts of China, also from Canada, the United States, Vietnam and Singapore. They have presented very similar presentations relating to the features of SARS. In particular that maybe of interest locally, is that in Hong Kong, we presented also the experiences that we had, where we had elderly patients with SARS who did not present typically. So this morning we heard from some of our geriatricians about geriatric patients, there were 18 older patients who are over the age of 65, who presented without fever. And of course they presented with things such as confusion that some of the elder patients were seen not to be too active, some refused to eat. So these were all varied atypical symptoms and that's why we have difficulties managing these patients in Hong Kong.
The other feature I heard was in term of looking at the prognosis of SARS patients. As you know that we had quite a substantial mortality rate from SARS in our patients and we heard a presentation where an analysis was done on a large number of patients in Hong Kong, where the major factor for determining death was age, there is no doubt about it, age is in fact the single most important determinant of death in our patients, the second if they have other chronic diseases, and the third if you are of a male sex. The male sex doesn't seem to do as well as the female sex. So these were the information that we had shared.
Reporter: (inaudible)
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: Obviously this workshop is a very important workshop because it get together people who have the most experience in managing SARS patients. There is a lot of experience in Canada, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam. We all have a lot of experience in large numbers of SARS patients. So this information would be very important and the information will feed into the international conference in Kuala Lumpur. The purpose of this workshop is to do the groundwork to express the details of the presentations, and the experts will be collectively coming out with what they call it the consensus statement.
The consensus statement usually is a statement based on the experiences of experts where they agree that these are the prognostic features of SARS, these are the causative factors, this is how we think clinical management in the future should be organised, and also to identify research questions because we don't have a lot of experience with SARS. Certainly the research in SARS has only been going on for the last few months. Obviously we are learning as we go. So these conferences are very important to provide the most updated information based on experiences and the best science. So it is a very very important workshop.
On Dr Heymann's and Dr Bruntland's visits, the purpose of the visits is really to come to Hong Kong to see for themselves some of the things we had done. In those visits, obviously we will be continuing our discussions with them in relation to the criteria for having the SARS affected areas (areas with recent local transmission) lifted from HK. Obviously we still have to do our part. We did not have any cases yesterday but we need to make sure that we continue not to have cases in Hong Kong. So we need to really to make sure that we are in total control and then for WHO to be confident in our system of control, and of course they have always expressed great confidence in our system because we have been providing with very detailed and updated information and we are very transparent in the things we are doing in Hong Kong. As they are coming to Hong Kong, we will provide the opportunity for them to see first hand in terms of our system of control and system of reporting and that would add to the credits of our system.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)
End/Friday, June 13, 2003
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