Communication breakdown 'worsened outbreak'
Sars Expert Committee urges formalised exchanges of information with mainland
A committee of international experts probing Hong Kong's management of the Sars outbreak has found a lack of communication with mainland health authorities was one of the main problems in the handling of the crisis.
The Sars Expert Committee, comprised of international health experts, said yesterday that improvements were needed in the exchange of information between Hong Kong and the mainland, and also among different sectors of the general and health-care community.
'The information had to go from Guangdong to Beijing to Hong Kong,' said the committee's public health group chairwoman, Sian Griffiths. 'What you need is much closer liaison. There is a need to formalise this communication to make sure there is an early warning ... There is nothing worse than information coming in bits when you have a communicable disease like Sars.'
The committee, set up by the government, has been widely criticised for having Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food Yeoh Eng-kiong as its chairman. Critics say it will be hard for the committee to give an impartial assessment as he is a government official.
The committee's public health group ended its five-day work session yesterday. Members of the group have met government officials from the Department of Health and Social Welfare Department, and Hospital Authority Chief Executive William Ho Shiu-wei.
It also visited residents of Amoy Gardens in Ngau Tau Kok and another estate nearby, and met other hospital executives, representatives of non-governmental organisations and caretakers of the elderly. It also held a meeting with about 100 public health workers, which was attended by Dr Yeoh.
Dr Griffiths, who is also president of the faculty of public health medicine at Britain's Royal Colleges of Physicians, said she was impressed with the tracing of Sars victims, the efforts of the public health workers and research by the two local universities.
But she would not comment on whether the government had reacted too late in quarantining residents at Amoy Gardens and suspected Sars cases in hospitals. She said the group would give a full report when it returned in August.
But representatives of the health-care profession were sceptical about whether enough time was spent on the investigation. 'Most of the experts are not local, and they don't have time to do detailed work to look at each case,' said Leung Ka-lau, the former president of the Public Doctors Association.
Kwok Ka-ki, convenor of the independent Action Group on Medical Policy think-tank, said: 'It's a black box. No one knows what they did.
'But it's not surprising ... because it was led by the government. I would anticipate that the report would neither satisfy the community nor the medical field.'
