In what appeared to be another slap in the face to Taiwan by the World Health Organization (WHO), four Taiwan medical experts have been invited to a global SARS conference but their invitations have been sent to China, a source from the Presidential Office said yesterday.
The cards, said the source, were in the hands of the Beijing-based Chinese Medical Association (CMA) as of press time last night.
A Chinese-language newspaper yesterday said that China was attempting to insert material into the invites showing that the Taiwan experts were attending the conference with the permission of China.
The Presidential Office source, however, could not be reached to verify this, or explain how China could alter the invitations.
The Geneva-based WHO refused to confirm whether the invitation cards had been sent directly to Taiwan or through China.
"I have no idea," said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson when asked where the WHO sent the cards.
Thompson said he did not even know whether the WHO had already sent out the invitations and that he had no intention of bothering the conference organizers to clarify the situtation.
The global SARS conference will be held in Malaysia's Sunway Lagoon Resort Hotel, close to the nation's capital city, Kuala Lumpur, on June 17 and 18.
A wide range of SARS-related issues will be discussed during the two-day conference. The session on the first day will open with reports on global and national response to the epidemic.
Taiwan is not on the list of five nations and one region invited to present their national response.
The WHO aske four Taiwanese experts, Su Ih-jen (蘇益仁), director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an Academia Sinica reseacher, and two doctors, Chang Shang-chwen (張上淳) and Chen Pei-jer (陳陪哲), to join the conference.
Chang is chief of the infectious disease department at National Taiwan University Hospital and Chen a virologist from the same hospital.
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