Hong Kong has done an excellent job against SARS, and the World Health Organization (WHO) will conduct a supplementary work focusing on the environmental transmission of the virus in Hong Kong.
WHO Senior Advisor William Cocksedge made the remarks Thursday after meeting with officials from the Department of Health of Hong Kong.
The WHO expert said that Hong Kong has done everything that should have been done at the time to combat SARS, and has done "an excellent job."
He noted that the WHO team conducting research in Hong Kong at the invitation of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government doesn't mean that they will replace or do better than what has been done in Hong Kong, as their work will supplement the efforts of the Hong Kong government. The WHO team will stay in Hong Kong for three weeks.
Cocksedge noted that his particular job after arriving in Hong Kong Wednesday was to set up a seven-member team, comprising of experts on building and environment from Canada and Austria, who will come to Hong Kong in the next few days.
When they all arrive, they will look at some buildings in Hong Kong, among them the Amoy Gardens, a residential estate which has witnessed the contraction of SARS of more than 300 residents.
Cocksedge pointed out part of the traveling advice WHO issued earlier against Hong Kong is based on the environmental transmission pattern of SARS in the Amoy Gardens, whose unusualness spells the necessity of their planned investigation.
Moreover, he said, a lot of expertise has been applied to the clinical and laboratory studies of SARS, but not in the cause and effect relationship between virus and environment.
Cocksedge stated that they will build on this part of knowledge on SARS so as to come up with more controlling measures of the highly-infectious virus in Hong Kong, where there are a lot of high-rising buildings with a high population density.
He noted that the report handed by the Hong Kong government on the case of Amoy Gardens proposed "a possible theory," and they will study the report carefully and conduct on-the-spot investigations to see if there are other possibilities.
(Xinhua News Agency April 25, 2003)
