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CDC still on guard against SARS

The Center for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday lifted the requirement that Singaporean visitors take their temperatures, reassured the public that Taiwan was prepared for another epidemic of SARS and promised to fortify Taiwan's tuberculosis treatment system.

The CDC said it was cancelling the requirement that Singaporeans take their temperatures twice a day for 10 days after they arrived because the WHO regarded a new SARS case in Singapore as an isolated case.

But visitors from China, Hong Kong and Macao are still required to undergo the "10-day self health management."

"We are very confident about dealing with SARS now since we have learned how to handle the epidemic," said CDC Director-General Su Ih-jen (蘇益仁).

Su said that more laboratories would be established in major hospitals, including Chang-gung Memorial Hospital in Linkou and Tzuchi Hospital in Hualien, to study the SARS virus. He also said that because of the SARS infection in Singaporean appeared to have occurred in a laboratory, the Department of Health had also demanded that local laboratory researchers be more careful when handling the virus.

Su said that Taiwan now had 19 hospitals specialized in infectious-disease prevention, and there were five top-level hospitals with 92 beds specially reserved for patients with infectious diseases, which Su hoped would be enough to deal with the next wave of SARS.

The five are: Taipei Municipal Hoping Hospital; the Department of Health's Taichung Hospital; Armed Forces Tainan Hospital; Kaohsiung Municipal Minsheng Hospital; and the Department of Health's Taitung Hospital.

Tuberculosis, another respiratory disease, also remains a health concern in Taiwan.

"The government is determined to improve the recovery rate from the current 74 percent to higher than 85 percent in three to five years," Su said.

"The most important task in the country's fight against tuberculosis is to keep track of every patient and make sure everyone is completely cured. Otherwise, for a tuberculosis patient, it is worse to take medication on and off without fully recovering than not taking any medication at all since the disease can become resistant," Su said.

Su also unveiled the CDC's plan for tuberculosis treatment. He said that the current tuberculosis treatment network needs to be strengthened, with clinics, specialized tuberculosis hospitals and medical centers cooperating better with each other.

He also said that payments from the National Health Insurance to hospitals for tuberculosis treatment are too low. He said a smear examination would take a medical technician at least half an hour to conduct but that the hospital would get just NT$42 from the government for each test.

Su said that, in the future, the insurance system would give much more in subsidies to hospitals for tuberculosis treatment but that the amount had not been determined.

Meanwhile, four experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Atlanta Center for Disease Control have headed to Singapore to examine the new SARS case that was diagnosed earlier this month.

Singapore has asked them to help review safety standards at the two laboratories where the patient worked. This is because the 27-year-old research student may well have picked up the virus at one of the two laboratories.

Safety standards at many of Singapore's advanced research laboratories, especially those like the Environmental Health Institute facility where SARS research is being done, are being reviewed.

Dr. Balaji Sadasivan, minister of state for health, said that there will be internal and external reviews on how the SARS infection might have happened.
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