Press Releases
Health Secretary urges SARS patients to seek early treatment
The Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr Yeoh Eng-kiong today (April 19) urged people who had fever, chills and body ache to seek medical treatment early because an early confirmation of the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) would produce good recovery rate.
Most of the people who failed to respond to the combination of treatments now used in Hong Kong to combat the disease fell into four main categories, he said.
They had a pre-existing illness, were 65 or older, sought treatment late in the course of the disease, or had an unusually severe form of it.
Dr Yeoh was accompanied to the press conference by four specialists who discussed the development of SARS in Hong Kong and trends of treatment for it.
They were Dr Yu Wai-cho, Consultant of the Department of Medicine And Geriatrics of Princess Margaret Hospital; Dr Loretta Yam, Chief-of-service Of Department of Medicine of Pamela Youde Eastern Hospital; Professor Joseph Sung, Faculty of Medicine, Chinese University of Hong Kong; and Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, Department of Microbiology, University of Hong Kong.
Each discussed a different facet of the disease's appearance and treatment in Hong Kong.
Professor Sung said the medical community was "in the dark" about the disease when it broke out in Hong Kong.
After treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics failed to produce results, clinicians moved to ribavirins and then to the current combination of ribavirins and steroids that was achieving good results in most cases.
Dr Yu presented a breakdown of the mortality rate up to April 15, which showed that Hong Kong had an overall death rate of 4.6 per cent from SARS. Of these, 47.5 per cent were aged 65 or older.
He said there had been no deaths among the 72 cases involving people aged 0 to 14, two deaths out of 467 people aged 15-34 (0.4 per cent), 17 deaths among the 476 people aged 35-54 (3.6 per cent), and six deaths among the 55-64 age group (6.6 per cent).
The Health Secretary followed up by pointing out that seven of the 17 deaths in the 35-54 group were of people who had pre-existing illnesses. When these were removed from the equation, the mortality rate from SARS among otherwise healthy people aged 35 to 54 was just two per cent.
Dr Yam said she and Dr Yu had visited Guangzhou on April 17 and 18 to explore how mainland medical authorities had treated the disease.
She said treatment and patients' responses had followed much the same course as in Hong Kong, and cross-boundary liaison would continue.
Professor Yuen warned that several treatment theories persisted. "There is no perfect treatment method that will succeed 100 per cent," he said. However, Hong Kong's 95 per cent response rate so far made him very proud. In some other countries death rates were higher than 10 per cent, he said.
He said research was continuing into ways to save the five per cent who failed to respond to the current treatment methods.
Dr Yeoh pointed out that Hong Kong's treatment was reached by empirical trial and error because there was no time to wait for clinical trials and double-blind experiments. Doctors and researchers used previous experience and intuition based on earlier studies to follow a course of treatment.
"We relied on our experts and they did rather well," he said.
Asked if the Hong Kong authorities intended to ban travel to the mainland, Dr Yeoh said people should be sensible but there was no reason to impose such a ban.
"For the ordinary citizen in the street there is really very little risk from travelling," he said, noting that 70 per cent of Hong Kong's 1300-odd cases came from the Prince of Wales Hospital and Amoy Gardens "clusters".
End/Saturday, April 19, 2003
NNNN