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J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2004;127:1553-1557
© 2004 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery

Editorial

At the epicenter of severe acute respiratory syndrome

Song Wan, MD, PhDa,*, Anthony P. C. Yim, MDa

a Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Department of Surgery, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Prince of Wales Hospital, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China

Received for publication February 24, 2004; accepted for publication March 1, 2004.

* Address for reprints: Song Wan, MD, PhD, Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Department of Surgery, Prince of Wales Hospital, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong, People's Republic of China
swan@cuhk.edu.hk

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others—his last breath. —Mark Twain

Hong Kong will take your breath away!" This simple slogan, used by the Hong Kong Tourism Board at the beginning of 2003, took a different meaning when severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) hit Hong Kong in early March.1,2 Over the following 3 months, 1755 cases emerged in Hong Kong, with a crude fatality rate of 17%.3 In the same period worldwide, SARS affected more than 8400 persons and claimed more than 900 lives.3-5 It was estimated by the Asian Development Bank that the SARS-related financial loss in Asia reached US $59 billion (about 5 times as high as that after the September 11 tragedy). Peculiarly but sadly, SARS is probably one of the few diseases that rapidly attacks health care professionals in the first place (Table 1). In Hong Kong alone, 386 health care workers came down with this new disease. Many of them, including one of the authors (S.W.), were young and previously healthy individuals.


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  		TABLE 1. Summary data of global SARS cases (November 2002 through August 2003)

 
Needless to say, SARS has profoundly changed our lives in this part of the world. When Dr Wechsler first invited us to write this special article for the Journal, we decided to approach such a subject not so much from a scientific viewpoint but rather from a personal perspective. We would like to share with our cardiothoracic surgical colleagues around the world how this disease affected us and, in particular, our perspective to medicine.

S. Wan: life-threatening experience

Recent statistics have shown that more than 80% of the Hong Kong health care workers who contracted SARS in 2003 were actually infected before the end of March 2003, when the world had little knowledge about this disease.

I was . . . [Full Text of this Article]




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