Hong Kong stronger after the SARS crisis

[Treyfish]

HONG KONG: There have been many key moments in Hong Kong's history since the city reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.

But nothing shook Hong Kong more in the last decade than the SARS crisis that broke out in early 2003.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome hit Hong Kong like a full-force gale in March 2003, bringing with it three months of fear and suspicion as people shunned direct contact with one another on the streets.

With the risk of infection ever present, food outlets and retail shops were hard-hit as Hong Kongers kept to their offices and homes.

Those were perilous times for healthcare workers in the front-line of the battle against the then little-known disease

Dr Raymond Wong caught SARS himself and said he is not likely to ever forget that bleak period.

The Medical and Health Officer at Prince of Wales Hospital said: "The doctors and nurses, even though they didn't know what they were dealing with, still tried their best to provide the best possible care. We also had a very good team to identify the cause in the lab."

The disease claimed nearly 300 lives before the city was declared SARS-free in June.

Dr Wong said: "The occurrence of SARS changed the Hong Kong society a lot. After the occurrence, the economy went down quite badly. Everybody suffered and they realised that this kind of health problem not only affects the victims, but also the society as a whole."

With the authorities heavily criticised for a lack of preparedness, the city has since made many changes to its health infrastructure and Hong Kong is now more ready to deal with future disease outbreaks.

Public hygiene programmes, stringent quarantine rules and border controls are in place, but the threat of a bird flu epidemic in Asia still keeps the territory on its guard.

The H5N1 virus killed six people here just months after Britain handed the territory back to China on 1 July 1997.

To prevent its spread, the entire poultry population of 1.4 million was culled.

But while the government managed to fight bird flu promptly, its slow response to SARS aroused public anger and was a critical factor in the resignation of former Hong Kong leader Tung Chee-hwa.

The show of people-power coincided with the sixth anniversary of the Handover.

Martin Lee, Founder, Democratic Party, said: "Everyone was smiling and they drew strength from the presence of so many people, and that evening, all the restaurants in the central area were full and the economy bounced back just because of that day."

Mr Lee believes the demonstration of unity removed lingering fears of infection and sparked a shared desire to revive the economy through domestic consumption.

The territory hit rock-bottom with the Asian Financial Crisis, bird flu, the bursting of the tech bubble and SARS.

But since then, with economic support from the mainland, Hong Kong has gone from strength to strength.

The key Hang Seng stock index has passed the 22,000 mark ? a stark contrast to the 15,200 level on the eve of the Handover.

And property prices are close to pre-'97 levels as Hong Kong continues to reap the benefits of belonging to a booming China.

[Treyfish]

Re: Hong Kong stronger after the SARS crisis

SARS survivors regain physical health but mental health toll lingers for some


Helen Branswell, Canadian Press

Published: Monday, June 25, 2007
TORONTO (CP) - Many of Toronto's SARS survivors largely regained their physical health within a year after their brush with the new disease, but for some the psychological toll of their illness lingered for months after their recovery, a new study reveals.
The authors suggest the finding underscores the need to build psychological support services into any planned response to a major disease outbreak, whether that is a flu pandemic or some other new disease.
The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that 33 per cent of studied survivors reported a significant decline in their mental health a year out from their recovery.


And at that year anniversary point - when the followup formally ended - 17 per cent of patients in the group still had not returned to work.
"We saw that the vast majority of people were returning to work, were quite functional and doing quite well," said senior author Dr. Margaret Herridge, a respirologist and critical care physician at Toronto's University Health Network.
"There is no question, though, that there was a very small but real minority of patients - most of whom were critically ill - who did have some longer-term physical sequelae (medical consequences) of SARS. A couple of those people I continue to follow."
The study evaluated at three, six and 12 months the recovery of 117 of Toronto's 387 probable and suspect SARS cases. More than half the participants in the study - 65 per cent - were health-care workers.
Dr. Alan Tallmeister, an anesthesiologist at Toronto's Scarborough Grace Hospital, is one of the lucky ones.
An exercise buff, Tallmeister recovered to the point where his times - whether swimming laps or on a rowing machine - were as good as they were before his brush with severe acute respiratory syndrome.
"As far as I'm concerned, now I just added it to my past repertoire of viral illnesses like mumps, measles, chickenpox when I was a kid," he said Monday.
Like many SARS victims, Tallmeister saw the disease spread in his household. His daughter, who was 15 when SARS hit Toronto in March 2003, caught the disease from him. She too has made a full recovery.
But for others, the impact of SARS lingers, in the lungs and in the psyche.
At the one-year mark, 18 per cent of the survivors still had a significant reduction in the distance they were able to walk in a six-minute period. And a small number of the cases - the people who were most severely ill - sustained lung damage that plagues them still.
"But we do have a couple of people who have significant lung disease that will be irreversible," said Herridge, who still treats some of these patients.
Vicki McKenna, first vice-president of the Ontario Nurses Association, said some nurses remain off the job because of the emotional trauma they experienced. They have anxiety disorders such as panic attacks. It's a general feeling that they have even just driving by a hospital. They have an overwhelming sense of panic and fear," she said.
The study noted that some of these patients were heavy users of mental health services during their recovery period; 51 required 668 visits to psychiatrists or psychologists.
There were 387 SARS patients in the Toronto area during the outbreak, which lasted from March to July of 2003.
One side-effect Toronto SARS patients seem to have avoided is the bone loss experienced by some SARS patients in China and Hong Kong, where in the early days of the outbreak heavy doses of corticosteroids were used in a desperate bid to try to treat the then unknown disease.

"By the time SARS got to North America we were tending to use much more modest doses of corticosteroids, because we had learned from the Chinese physicians' experience," Herridge said.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/n...6c5&k=5323&p=1

[Blue]

Re: Hong Kong stronger after the SARS crisis

HONG KONG: There have been many key moments in Hong Kong's history since the city reverted to Chinese rule in 1997.

[B]But nothing shook Hong Kong more in the last decade than the SARS crisis that broke out in early 2003.

Good article. Is there a link?