Health chief said Sars acronym was too similar to special administrative region
There was a 12-day delay in adding Sars to the list of diseases for which people could be forced into quarantine because Hong Kong's health chief was opposed to calling the illness Sars and had doubts about its definition, a former health official said yesterday.
Secretary for Health, Welfare and Food Yeoh Eng-kiong was not happy that the name - coined by the World Health Organisation on March 15 - sounded like the acronym for the special administrative region, Margaret Chan Fung Fu-chun, the former director of health, told a Legco committee on Sars.
Dr Yeoh had suggested the word 'acute' be dropped so that the disease would be known as 'SRS' - for severe respiratory syndrome, instead of Sars for severe acute respiratory syndrome.
'I had no arguments with him. I only said that there was no way for us to argue with the WHO.'
Dr Chan said implementing quarantine and isolation orders in an infected area such as Hong Kong would have meant isolating a huge number of people.
She said top-level deliberations by the Sars Steering Committee - chaired by Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa to guide the government's response to the outbreak - over the definition of Sars led to a 12-day delay in adding Sars to the list of quarantinable diseases.