Press Releases

Government has overall response system to guard against SARS

The Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food, Dr Yeoh Eng-kiong, said today (September 23) that the government would discuss with the Hospital Authority (HA) the communication of HA's internal Response Plan for Infectious Disease Outbreak in the setting of the Government's overall three-level response system.

Refuting criticisms which suggested the Government and HA would be running two alerting systems, Dr Yeoh said HA's Response Plan was part of the Government's response system on SARS.

"The HA's red-yellow-green response is in fact its own subsector response which is intended for internal communication. It is a simple method that will give a signal to HA's staff on the response required in the context of an overall response," he said.

Dr Yeoh's remarks were made following his inspection of the border health control measures at Lowu.

Since the SARS outbreak, health control measures including health declaration and temperature checks have been in place to heighten public awareness, to encourage reporting of illness for early treatment and to prevent the spread of SARS.

Noting that there would be an upsurge in passenger flow during the upcoming National Day period, Dr Yeoh said strict health screening for SARS at the border would be strengthened to meet the expected upsurge and to combat possible spread of infectious diseases.

"We will deploy 60 more health surveillance assistants to station at the border and 28 more scanners at immigration counters to meet the increased passenger load for health screening," he added.

End/Tuesday, September 23, 2003
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