The Department of Health (DOH) confirmed the first death from severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, leaving the country's zero SARS death record in tatters.
The 56-year-old Taiwanese man, surnamed Tseng, was the brother of a resident in Hong Kong's Amoy Gardens housing estate, where the city's largest-scale mass infections took place, Lee Ming-liang (
Tseng's brother infected him when traveling to Taiwan to sweep his family's tomb on March 26. Tseng's brother also had a fever after returning to Hong Kong, was admitted to the hospital and is in a stable condition, according to Lee.
Tseng died around 10:10pm Saturday night, from bacterial septicemia and multiple organ failure, said Taichung's China Medical College Hospital (CMCH), where Tseng was admitted on April 3.
Tseng was Taichung's first and the country's 18th probable SARS case. He was the first reported victim to be infected by an Amoy Gardens visitor in Taiwan, the hospital said. The lab at the Center for Disease Control (CDC) also confirmed that Tseng was infected by coronavirus, the cause of SARS.
Despite the hospital's best efforts, Tseng's condition had been deteriorating since he was admitted to the hospital, which performed an intubation operation on him and put him on a ventilator on April 11, the hospital said.
Tseng died even though the hospital later used an extracorporeal circulation machine to support the functioning of his heart and lungs, said the CMCH.
Taichung City Health Bureau said Tseng's body was cremated yesterday afternoon because the Communicable Disease Prevention Law (傳染病防治法) stipulates that bodies of patients who died of a statutory transmissible disease must be cremated within 24 hours after death.
The bureau added that Tseng had not infected his family members or any of the hospital's staff. It said required every worker involved in Tseng's cremation procedures to take strict precautionary measures.
All workers involved in the cremation procedure were required to wear facemasks, gloves and robes. After the cremation, the funeral parlor would be disinfected, the bureau said.
The bureau also demanded the CMCH be disinfected.
Twu Shiing-jer (涂醒哲), director-general of the DOH, said yesterday the death has not been reported to the World Health Organization yet.
"We might say the case died of SARS. But whether he died of bacterial infection occurring during his intubation or of SARS still needs to be verified," Twu said.
Twu said usually SARS patients die a few days after infection. However, as Tseng had survived for about a month, Twu said there was space for discussion on the true cause of his death.
To cope with the increase of cases, the CDC said it has recruited four hospitals around the country to accommodate SARS patients.
For the hospitals' privacy, the CDC will not say which hospitals will receive SARS patients.
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