Some surgical masks provided to medical workers treating patients with the deadly SARS virus were faulty, Hong Kong's Hospital Authority admitted today, one day after a male nurse died of the disease.
"When we conducted random checks of the surgical masks, we found a small number were faulty," a hospital authority spokesman said, without elaborating how they were defective.
The admission comes after criticism that the authority has failed to provide medical workers with adequate protective gear against the virus.
The death yesterday of a 38-year-old male nurse, the first medical worker to die here from the pneumonia-like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus that had so far killed 133 people in Hong Kong, has added fuel to the criticism.
To date, 347 health care workers have been infected, or around 22 per cent of the total 1,543 confirmed SARS cases in the city.
AFP