Well, they’re still hashing out the last epidemic, and making correction. Free China has done the medical forensics and their numbers drop. WHO Lowers Reported SARS Cases in Taiwan
By ANNIE HUANG, Associated Press Writer
TAIPEI, Taiwan - The World Health Organization (news - web sites) has drastically lowered the number of reported SARS (news - web sites) cases in Taiwan in this year’s outbreak, after laboratory tests showed about half had other ailments.
The recorded cases fell from 682 to 346, while the number killed by severe acute respiratory syndrome dropped to 37 from the earlier reported 84, according to the WHO Web site.
Taiwan reduced by about a half the numbers it provided the Geneva-based U.N. agency after tests showed many of the cases reported during the February-June outbreak were not SARS, the Taiwanese Center of Disease Control said Friday.
The revision “was all largely due to having the opportunity to go back and test the samples of probable SARS cases,” said WHO spokesman Dick Thompson in Geneva. He said many countries have made small changes but Taiwan’s was by far the biggest.
Many of those listed as SARS patients were quarantined after they developed the disease’s symptoms, including fever and lung infections, officials said.
But many had developed pneumonia caused by viruses other than SARS, and many of the deaths were elderly men and women with chronic illnesses who were misdiagnosed, the officials said.
The highly contagious disease killed more than 900 and sickened more than 8,400 people before WHO declared in June that it had been “stopped dead in its tracks.”
Taiwan was the third hardest hit by SARS after mainland China and Hong Kong. China had 5,327 infections and 349 deaths, and Hong Kong had 1,755 cases with 299 dead.
A report Thursday in Hong Kong said health officials were caught off guard by the SARS crisis, and their response was hampered by poor planning and sloppy communications.
The report said Hong Kong was placed at a disadvantage by a lack of information from China’s neighboring Guangdong province, where the disease originated last November.
Hong Kong had a 17.1 percent fatality rate from SARS, the experts compiling the report said, compared with 6.6 percent in mainland China and 27.1 percent in Taiwan.
“Overall the epidemic in Hong Kong was handled well, although there were clearly significant shortcomings of system performance during the early days of the epidemic when little was known about the disease or its cause,” the report said.
The report, which found fault with Hong Kong’s health system but not the officials, drew harsh criticism Friday and demands for a separate legislative inquiry into what went wrong.
In China and Taiwan, top health officials lost their jobs over problems in the response to SARS.
“How could you say no one was culpable for an epidemic that infected more than 1,700 people and killed almost 300?” asked lawmaker Michael Mak, who is a registered nurse.
Here’s the latest table from WHO: LINK
The interesting thing about this table is that they included the death rate, and they listed the numbers of health care workers who got SARS (21% of total cases!). Communist China continues to have the lowest death rate among major outbreaks, and it’s a lie.
Also, time to remember that SARS began in November last year. If we’re going to see another outbreak, it will begin in the next two months.
