Taipei Times: Can you talk about what the US had to say about the role it played during the SARS outbreak?
Chen Chien-jen (
The GAO, in evaluating whether or not to send people to Taiwan, had considered what the US could gain from sending healthcare workers. Actually, they told me they had found that SARS prevention was carried out very well in Taiwan and that the US had learned from our experiences. The people they sent to Taiwan worked with us shoulder-to-shoulder, hand-in-hand, day and night. It really was like that. They worked with us for up to 16 hours a day, and CDC personnel were the first to enter Hoping Hospital at the start of the outbreak. US support was very helpful in fighting SARS.
PHOTO: TAIPEI TIMES FILE PHOTO
The GAO office informed me that the CDC had sent more people to Taiwan to help with SARS prevention than any other nation.
Taipei Times: Are there any plans for future cooperation?
Chen: I told the GAO that ... I would like us not only to work with each other but to support the healthcare needs of other countries together. The greatest difficulty Taiwan faces is that even when we want to help other nations, there are no appropriate channels for donations when we don't have diplomatic ties. If we work with the US to establish a joint medical team, then our concern and skills can reach other nations.
Medical aid should not be limited to our diplomatic allies since there are no national borders when it comes to medical need. The GAO had been enthusiastic about such cooperation.
We also discussed the possibility of sending Department of Health (DOH) personnel to the US for training with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). We talked about sending people from our Center for Disease Control to their CDC, people from our Bureau of Food Sanitation to their Food and Drug Administration, our Bureau of Medical Affairs to their Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. We're currently negotiating an agreement.
In addition, there is a need for Taiwan's medical experts to work with the Fogarty International Center, a branch of the NIH that funds international research. Taiwan used to have a lot of Fogarty fellows.
But since Taiwan's economy has improved in recent years, we've had fewer of them. Because the Fogarty fellowship is generally accepted as a standard for quality healthcare research, it opens up opportunities for Taiwan's experts to do research with other medical centers and universities. We don't need the money anymore, but we need the opportunities. In the future, the NIH could name Fogarty fellows in Taiwan without funding the research.
Taipei Times: Did you discuss Taiwan's World Health Organization (WHO) bid with your counterpart, Secretary for Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson?
Chen: I did not initially plan on bringing up the topic of Taiwan's WHO membership campaign but Thompson brought up the issue and expressed his support. When Taiwan was still in the WHO, we were a model nation.
However, in the future, if we are given membership in the WHO, we will no longer play the role of recipient, but contributor. We will contribute our public health skills and also give financially. While financial aid is important, money and skills have to be offered together. With regard to a possible referendum on Taiwan's entry into the WHO, the only real function of that is raising awareness. I think we already agree on this issue in Taiwan, but the referendum can bring attention to the issue [elsewhere]. It's an announcement made to other nations.
Taipei Times: Given the fact that SARS is now under control, what are some future goals for the DOH?
Chen: In the future, I'd like to see our Center for Disease Control become a first-rate laboratory with the ability to identify and handle infectious diseases efficiently. The center needs to be on top of the latest epidemiological techniques, comprehensive disease surveillance, efficient case reporting and unified treatment procedures. The center should be able to deal with emerging infectious diseases and bioterrorism effectively.
There is also a need to provide the DOH's bureau and section chiefs with more training opportunities and by doing so raise the standards of the DOH.
With regard to the National Health Insurance, the future focus will be on preventive medicine and not just on treatment. We need to invest in health by putting money into keeping people healthy instead of emergency treatment. If we don't invest in health and continue only to purchase treatment, the cost will continue to increase with an increasing number of patients.
Also, increasing quality of treatment allows patients to live longer, further increasing the number of patients receiving medical treatment.
We also need to create an emergency operating center. When I went to visit Tommy Thompson, he showed me his state-of-the-art emergency operation center. It's a large room with a wall full of TV screens. He can call up last week's Influenza A trends in Wisconsin, for example. He can see in which street and in which city a case of some disease occurs.
We need to establish this type of coordination center. It will take some time to establish, but it's something we should do.
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:
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