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WHO lists Taiwan as a part of China

"We've sent a letter to the WHO, requesting it to correct the name from `Taiwan (China)' to `Taiwan.'"

Twu Shiing-jer, head of department of health

The Department of Health yesterday protested against the WHO referring to the country as "Taiwan (China)" on its list of reported cases of atypical pneumonia.

The WHO included Taiwan for the first time in its third update, released on Tuesday, on worldwide cases of what it is calling severe acute respiratory disease (SARS).

Twu Shiing-jer (涂醒哲), director-general of the Department of Health, yesterday said that the organization should correct the nation's name in the statement.

"We've sent a letter to the WHO, requesting it to correct the name from `Taiwan (China)' to `Taiwan,'" Twu said.

Twu spoke after the weekly closed-door Cabinet affairs meeting yesterday morning in which he briefed Premier Yu Shyi-kun on the global outbreak, which has killed 10 people and left hundreds ill.

According to Twu, the WHO had ignored the department's report of the three local suspected cases of SARS until yesterday, when the number of suspected cases rose to four.

"We thought it was not fair for the WHO to keep ignoring our requests for medical assistance and unfair to the 23 million Taiwanese people to be excluded from the international health community," Twu said.

So far the WHO has offered Taiwan no direct assistance, although it asked officials from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to visit the country.

Two officials, based in Bangkok, arrived on Sunday to join the investigation of the cause of the infections.

Twu yesterday also called on the families of China-based Taiwanese businesspeople to update their loved ones on developments in identifying the disease, as information has been restricted there.

"Our advice to Taiwanese bus-inesspeople based in China who have been infected with the disease is to seek local medial treatment instead of rushing home to seek help," Twu said.

The health department also announced yesterday that it had identified the kind of virus that had sickened the three people here as paramyxovirus, the same virus identified in SARS patients in Hong Kong, Singapore and Germany.

"The discovery marks a breakthrough in identifying the pathogen of the illness," said Chen Tsai-chin (陳再晉), director of the department's Center for Disease Control.

Chen, however, said that it would take further serum studies to determine the exact agent because the paramyxoviridae family comprises many virus strains.

Scientists around the world have been trying to identify the deadly disease.

Doctors in Germany said that they were treating three people with the illness, including a 32-year-old doctor from Singapore and his pregnant wife. The physician had treated some of the first pneumonia cases in the city state.

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