Word: taipei
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...when given the choice, prefers noodles to rice. Last Friday, she stood behind her father fidgeting with her face mask and staring at the swarm of photographers who surrounded her and at the smiling face of her mother who looked down from a picture frame hanging in a Taipei funeral parlor. Her mother was nurse Chen Ching-chiu, who died in the line of duty at the age of 48 and has become a touchstone for Taiwan's heartbreak and frustration at the government's inability to curb the spread of the virus...
...March 16 sent a team from its Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to liaise with the island's government health officials. The government could have relayed information about protocol to help prevent hospital transmissions, which have been commonplace wherever the virus has struck?yet hospital administrators in Taipei say they received no data. "Everything we know, we learned from the Internet," says Lee Yuan-teh, superintendent...
...Some critics say politics played a role in Taiwan's sclerotic containment efforts?specifically, that a hostile relationship between President Chen and the mayor of Taipei, Ma Ying-jeou, made coordination difficult. Rivals for much of the past decade, Ma unseated Chen in Taipei's 1998 mayoral election, sending him into the political wilderness until his upset presidential victory in 2000. The relationship between the two plummeted to new lows during the recent mayoral race, with Ma and Chen trading insults throughout the campaign...
...Joseph Wu, Chen's deputy secretary-general, pointed out that some of the hospitals suffering the worst outbreaks are under the direct control of the local Taipei government. But he acknowledged Chen's Cabinet ministers "should have reacted more quickly to the situation and been more decisive in telling hospitals what to do." Indeed, the island's Health Minister may have been sacked partly because he failed to heed calls by the city government to declare SARS an infectious disease, which resulted in complacency among medical staff...
...Chen administration is taking control. A Cabinet-level anti-SARS task force has been hastily assembled, the military has been called into action to help disinfect Taipei's streets and hospitals and strict quarantine measures have been imposed in the capital with stiff fines for violators. Still, some worry that the disease is gathering momentum and bureaucratic reaction times remain too slow. A foreign health-care specialist, who declined to be identified, notes that more than 100 suspected SARS cases in Taiwan have yet to be reviewed by epidemiologists?meaning the number of victims might be substantially higher than...