The rapid expansion of Taiwan's health-care system may have placed stresses on its hospitals and clinics and that may have compromised some of the facilities' air-handling systems during the current SARS epidemic, the head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday.
As a result, ventilation in some hospital rooms might not be adequate for proper infection control, CDC director Julie Gerberding said in a press briefing at the center's headquarters in Atlanta on Thursday.
"I think the concerns are that the physical environment of a health-care facility, and the air handling in a health-care facility can be very variable," Gerberding said.
As a result, "there are examples where you think you have the proper airborne precautions in place, but the mechanics of the ventilation in the room fail, or the degree or air exchanges expected are not adequate to provide that level of ventilation," she said.
"And in a time of crisis and when these health-care facilities in Taiwan are undergoing rapid expansion and the whole system is under stress, it's entirely plausible that there could be breaches in infection control," Gerberding said.
Gerberding made her comments in answer to a question about the CDC scientist who developed SARS-like symptoms while working in Taiwan. The press conference was dominated by questions about his case.
Gerberding called the current situation in Taiwan "disturbing," saying that the ongoing increase in reported cases means "we fully expect the case counts to go up because of reporting delays, recognition delays, and the overall complexity of trying to track such a rapid and complex outbreak in real time."
Gerberding praised Taiwan's health authorities for "taking all of the appropriate steps to achieve containment."
"But it's a huge challenge and one that is going to take continued effort on the part of the entire health system in Taiwan," Gerberding said.
"It's a very serious and sobering situation, and I think we remain hopeful that ultimately, they too will be able to achieve containment as they did in the early stages of the epidemic," Gerberding said. "But it's a very challenging situation right now."
Responding to a reporter's question about a possible cover-up of cases by hospitals and doctors in Taiwan, Gerberding rejected the implication, saying that "our team has had a strong sense that the information is coming forward in the way that we would expect it to."
In terms of the reporting lag she mentioned earlier, the director noted that there is an advisory group in Taiwan that reviews suspected cases to see whether they actually fit the SARS definition before reporting them.
"As you can imagine with the number of cases that are currently in the queue, that reporting process is taking a bit longer," she said.
"But I think the important thing is that they are responding to the suspected cases on the ground with the appropriate public health interventions," Gerberding said.
"So, I'm not concerned at this point in time about a cover-up on the part of the government," although individuals may be too frightened to report their own sickness, she said.
Gerberding refused to speculate over how the US scientist got sick. While noting that the vast majority of transmissions in Taiwan have happened in health-care facilities, and "that's the leading hypothesis," she said that it could have been "in the community."
Gerberding would not speculate on whether the scientist contracted anything at the Sheraton Hotel in which he was staying.
"It may be that we'll never exactly know when or where his exposure occurred," she said.
Gerberding said that a team of CDC workers will leave the US for Taiwan "imminently" to replace the evacuated US scientists.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching