A group of six US medical specialists is due to arrive in Taiwan today to exchange opinions with medical staff treating the hundreds of victims of last month’s Formosa Fun Coast (八仙海岸) water park inferno, as fatalities from the catastrophic event continue to climb.
Ministry of Health and Welfare Office of International Cooperation official Hsu Ming-hui (許明暉) said the team consists of seven experts from the Johns Hopkins University Burn Center — four burn specialists, one emergency care physician, one occupational therapist and one nurse.
“Unlike the team of six Japanese doctors who mostly visited hospitals in northern Taiwan during their week-long stay, which concluded yesterday, the US team is scheduled to visit a number of medical institutions across the nation that are treating the victims,” Hsu said.
Hsu added that the team led by the center’s director, Stephen Milner, is not going to interfere with local doctors’ treatments of the patients, and that they want to offer medical advice and promote the exchange of experiences between Taiwanese and US medical specialists.
The visit was announced one day after the worst amusement park disaster in the nation’s history claimed its seventh fatality, a 20-year-old female college student named Lin Chih-yun (林芷妘), who suffered burns to 81 percent of her body.
Lin was removed from an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) machine on July 7 after her condition stabilized. However, she experienced sepsis and multiple organ failure on Wednesday, prompting her family to turn off life support to end her suffering.
According to the ministry’s latest victim monitoring statistics, as of 10am yesterday, 375 people remained hospitalized at 13 medical institutions nationwide, including 242 in intensive care units and 183 in critical condition.
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