Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Steve Kuo (郭旭崧) yesterday said he has asked for a punishment for ineffective responsive measures taken against the influenza A (H1N1) pandemic, while Minster of Health and Welfare Chiang Been-huang (蔣丙煌) said a comprehensive self-examination would be undertaken.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare was heavily criticized by legislators for acting too slowly against the flu pandemic, with insufficient medical resources for treating emergency cases of serious flu-related complications at a meeting of the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee in Taipei yesterday.
In the ministry’s report, Chiang said as of Sunday, a total of 1,419 serious flu-related complications, including 84 deaths, had been reported since July last year. The peak of the annual flu season in in late February.
Compared with the 1,109 cases of serious flu-related complications reported on Tuesday last week, the ministry’s report showed that 310 new cases were reported in the past week — the third consecutive week with more than 300 new cases.
Criticizing the CDC for treating the deaths as “just numbers” and showing disregard for human life, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) asked why the CDC did not establish an central command center for the flu pandemic, when it has already caused the public to panic.
“If the CDC had raised the epidemic prevention level and started vaccination coverage earlier, the outbreak would not have become so serious,” Liu said, adding that a central command center was established during the SARS outbreak in 2003.
“Being a caretaker Cabinet does not mean being a Cabinet in hibernation,” New Power Party Legislator Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸) said.
The CDC clearly underestimated the flu outbreak, and there has been a failure of internal communication and a slow response by the ministry’s Department of Medical Affairs, which has even miscalculated the number of beds in intensive care units at hospitals, Hung said.
DPP Legislator Chen Ying (陳瑩) said that while the Department of Medical Affairs vice director had said there were no extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machines in Taitung, department Director Wang Tsung-hsi (王宗曦) said there is one, while a hospital in Taitung said it had two ECMO machines, which shows that the ministry had failed to document important information.
In response, Kuo said he was sorry that the CDC did not forecast the seriousness of the flu pandemic, nor warn the public or medical practitioners in time, while inadequate communication with front-line medical practitioners might have caused them to underestimate the problem.
Kuo said he has already apologized to the minister and had asked to be punished for the ineffective responsive measures, but did not reply to legislators’ question about what specific punishment he expected to receive.
Kuo said the CDC believed that a central command center was not necessary for the flu outbreak, because it already has an emergency response team that monitors the pandemic and discusses appropriate measures to take, and that sometimes a central command center leads to more inefficient administrative meetings.
Asked whether officials at the ministry would be punished, Chiang said that a comprehensive self-assessment of the ministry’s response would be performed after the flu pandemic comes to an end.
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