Press Releases

Transcript of Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food on Nethesole incident

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 at the Central Government Offices today (August 27):


Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: I just want to update members of the public on the outbreak of this respiratory illness in the Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital (Nethersole Hospital). As you know that seven of the health care workers in that hospital reported sick with an illness very similar to flu-like illness. Most of the health care workers have already returned to work, so the illness is very mild. Nevertheless, this is part of the alert mechanisms whereby the hospitals would be alerted if there are more than two health care workers reporting sick with respiratory illness within a short span of time. Then the Department of Health would also be alerted to do the contact tracing to investigate to see whether there is any possible SARS outbreak in these sort of circumstances or whether there is anything that we needed to look at. Fortunately in this present incident, the illness experienced is very mild, most of the health care workers have already returned to work. The initial test in the Prince of Wales Hospital on the specimens they got from these workers showed that they have not been infected by the SARS coronavirus. However, they needed to do further confirmative tests. So far, the initial test confirmed that this is some form of respiratory illness which is flu-like but is not caused by SARS coronavirus. In connection with this alert mechanism, the Task Force on SARS, which I chaired, had agreed yesterday that we should adopt the recommendations of the World Health Organisation to develop the SARS alert mechanism. So this SARS alert mechanism will be brought into action if there are more than two health care workers in a hospital from the same ward who come down with a pneumonia like illness, which cannot be explained by any other cause. Or if there are three or more individuals in a ward, these include either staff, patients or their relatives, who come down with a pneumonia like illness which cannot be explained by other causes. So this alert mechanism will bring into force the investigations of both the hospital and the Department of Health to make sure that if there is any outbreak that we are able to contain it at the soonest possible time. And the discussions between the Department of Health and the Hospital Authority will be in terms of the actions that have been taken, the isolation of the patients in the ward under the circumstances, when is it that we feel comfortable to permit the patients to leave the wards. For instance, today in the Nethersole incident, the Department of Health and the Hospital Authority are having a meeting now to review the isolation order for the ward that has been infected in Nethersole to see whether we need to continue to enforce this isolation order where patients are not permitted to be admitted or discharged from the wards. So, these are very cautious actions for we believe that at this moment in time should err on the side of caution because we don't want SARS to recur in Hong Kong, certainly not the same epidemic that we had early in the year. I think here the Government has been doing a lot of work to prepare ourselves better for any possible outbreak but the individual contributions, the personal hygiene is a very important component of the preventive action which I would like to take this opportunity to encourage the public to continue to take measures to protect themselves because washing hands frequently -- certainly after going to toilet before eating -- is a very, very useful preventive measure and I would like to encourage the public to continue to do this because I know that a lot of individuals are already starting not to practise this. The other thing which is very important is the wearing of masks. If one has respiratory illness, you should wear a mask to protect other individuals from getting the droplet infection. And if you are taking care of a patient or relative who has respiratory illness, then you should also wear a mask. So under those circumstances individuals should wear mask. Of course, all health care workers whenever they see patients should wear mask. So those are two simple measures that we can take. The third is of course environmental hygiene. You know, the Chief Secretary's Committee has highlighted the problems that we're facing. The recent problem that we had, reported yesterday by the media, is the cholera that we found in a fish tank in To Kwa Wan. This is certainly unacceptable because you should never have cholera in tanks where you are rearing fish. I think they know the importance of the environmental hygiene and I think we would like to certainly encourage the public to help us tackle this problem. The Food and Environmental Hygiene Department will be looking into this matter and will be doing investigation to find out how this actually occurred. And then we will be discussing measures to make sure it doesn't happen again because this is certainly unacceptable that we have aquariums that are rearing fish for human consumption which can be contaminated by the cholera bacteria.

Reporter: (On alert mechanism)

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: Certainly, the alert mechanism needs a lot of work. One of the criteria is that the illness cannot be explained by other causes. So, it means exclusion, exclusion by other viruses, exclusion for other causes. And it usually takes some times before it is excluded. Nevertheless, we need to see how the mechanism is going to work before it is excluded because we cannot wait for everything to exclude before we take action. So, in this context of the case in Nethersole, you would imagine that in fact it doesn't need all the criteria because you have not excluded the other causes. Nevertheless, you have already put in measures, you cannot afford to wait for another six or seven days before you exclude there are other causes. In the context of the Nethersole case, so far the investigations have shown that the initial specimen have not shown SARS-coronavirus by PCR but they are considering other tests. Certainly, it is encouraging that the initial tests are negative and the clinical symptoms are also not consistent because they are very mild. But they have not found other viruses because it is not sometimes easy to isolate virus and of course it takes time to isolate viruses. For influenza virus, you can do the antigen from the aspirate and that gives you results very very quickly. And the initial influenza antigen is negative.

Reporter: (inaudible)

Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food: I think everything is possible but it certainly seems to be a mild respiratory illness and there are many other causes for that. So, I think it is really a question of excluding other causes and making sure that the infection does not infect even if it is not SARS-coronavirus. We certainly do not want to have unnecessary illness so we are saying that we are also reviewing the actual infection control procedures in the hospitals and the hospitals will do that.


(Please also refer to the Chinese portion)

End/Wednesday, August 27, 2003
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