Press Releases

SFH on flu vaccination and melamine incidents

Following is the transcript of remarks made by the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, at a stand-up media session after inspecting the implementation of the Government Influenza Vaccination Programme at an elderly home today (November 3):

Reporter: How many private doctors joined the scheme?

Secretary for Food and Health: Today we start the Government Influenza Vaccination Programme. Like previous seasons, we start the programme from November until the end of March. We will be vaccinating all the at-risk groups, including residents in the 770 old age homes. The Department of Health will go around and vaccinate all the residents. In this year, we also start to support children between six months and six years old to have vaccination at the private clinics. So far, more than 500 doctors have registered for this programme. We foresee that up to around a thousand will be actually able to provide the service within the next few weeks. This would allow the patients and parents to choose their own doctors for vaccination of their own children.

Reporter: Is it possible to test every batch of food instead of random sampling?

Secretary for Food and Health: We are doing both. In fact in ordinary food we will just have to do random sampling to see which type is more at risk. But once we start to focus on a certain type of food, we will go more upstream to test those foods, so that we can test almost every batch. For example, all the fresh milk and raw milk coming from the Mainland are now being tested this way.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)


Ends/Monday, November 3, 2008
Issued at HKT 15:34

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