When SARS struck earlier this spring, teams of scientists, doctors, nurses and police banded together to fight the epidemic.
Last Monday, two elite figures in the world of medicine graced room 112 of the Nursing Education Building to discuss SARS with a crowd of students, faculty and community members. Both from the University of Hong Kong, Sophia Siu-Chee Chan, head of the department of Nursing Studies, and Gabriel M. Leung, Clinical Assistant Professor in Public Health Medicine, gave a lecture entitled, "SARS: The Intersection of Public Health, Epidemiology and Clinical Nursing."
Chan and Leung spoke of their experiences during the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong this year.
"The SARS experience has taught us that nursing and public health must work together to manage an epidemic," Leung said. "Everyone worked together. Police lent us their criminal tracking system so we could track the contact of SARS patients."
Leung went on to discuss how the disease spread throughout Hong Kong.
"Hong Kong not only exports garments and other products, it also exported SARS to the rest of the world," he said.
Leung also noted supernatural elements of the epidemic.
"I'm beginning to feel that numerology has its value because the hotel room number [of the first SARS patient] was 911," he said. "On that same floor were visitors from Toronto, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. That's how it spread to the rest of the world."
During the epidemic there was a great deal of panic in Hong Kong.
"We saw a lot of voluntary quarantines," said Leung. "Hong Kong was like a ghost town for a couple of weeks."
Chan then took the mic to discuss the affects that SARS had on the nursing community. In Hong Kong, 300,000 nurses were at the forefront of the fight against SARS.
According to Chan, one of the main goals of the nurses was to educate the community about SARS.
"We tried to go to primary and secondary schools to teach the kids proper hand washing and mask wearing," she said.
Chan and Leung held a brief question and answer forum at the close of their presentation. A question was posed as to the response of the community to SARS.
"My observation is that the nurses and physicians have held very highly together," Chan said. "To me, this is part of what we're here for. My students called me and said 'they're asking for volunteers in hospitals, how can we help?'"
Leung agreed, adding that "we shouldn't take it for granted that we had a very strong and stable workforce who stayed together through this -- I think we were really blessed."
Despite Hong Kong's excellent medical workforce, the disease still struck hard.
"Nothing prepared us for SARS," Leung said.
