Living arrangements and elderly care : the case of Hong Kong

Hong Kong has been a British Colony for more than one and a half centuries. The British has provided a legal-administrative framework under which the Chinese live and work (Chan and Lee, 1995), The Census showed that ninety-eight percent of the Territory\u27s total population are ethnically Chinese. In 1991, nearly one half of HongKong\u27s residents were immigrants from the Chinese Mainland and two thirds of the remaining were Hong Kong born off-springs of immigrants from the mainland. Although expatriotes from other countries are accountable for the remainder 2% of the population, a great majority of expatriotes are from overseas Chinese communities in southeast Asia: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma. It cannot be overstated that Hong Kong has a fairly homogenous cultural values that can be described as “Chinese”, the beliefs with respect to filial piety and honouring one\u27s ancestors still play a significant role in shaping and regulating the local Chinese social life and familial behavior

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Genomic reconstruction of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in England.

The evolution of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus leads to new variants that warrant timely epidemiological characterization. Here we use the dense genomic surveillance data generated by the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium to reconstruct the dynamics of 71 different lineages in each of 315 English local authorities between September 2020 and June 2021. This analysis reveals a series of subepidemics that peaked in early autumn 2020, followed by a jump in transmissibility of the B.1.1.7/Alpha lineage. The Alpha variant grew when other lineages declined during the second national lockdown and regionally tiered restrictions between November and December 2020. A third more stringent national lockdown suppressed the Alpha variant and eliminated nearly all other lineages in early 2021. Yet a series of variants (most of which contained the spike E484K mutation) defied these trends and persisted at moderately increasing proportions. However, by accounting for sustained introductions, we found that the transmissibility of these variants is unlikely to have exceeded the transmissibility of the Alpha variant. Finally, B.1.617.2/Delta was repeatedly introduced in England and grew rapidly in early summer 2021, constituting approximately 98% of sampled SARS-CoV-2 genomes on 26 June 2021

Problems of primary health care in a newly developed society: Reflections on the Hong Kong experience

Hong Kong has emerged as a newly developed society in Asia and its modern scientific health care system has had a substantial expansion. Recently, the rise of medical costs has made the health authority come to stress the development of PHC. This paper focusses on three major aspects of the PHC development in Hong Kong: (1) public health and preventive care; (2) food supply and nutrition; and (3) first-contact medical care and referral network. It is argued that in a newly developed society, the emphasis on developing both the quality and the quantity of PHC in the scientific biomedical stream is justifiable. However, at least two kinds of problems need to be taken into consideration, i.e. the prevalence of traditional beliefs and practices and the ever-rising demands of the public for health services.

Comparative studies of health care systems

This paper reveals the dynamics of hierarchical medical pluralism through a comparative analysis of the health care systems in three Chinese societies (the China mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong). It is argued that the hierarchical relationships among medical traditions within a national society should be studied in terms of structural superiority (power, prestige and wealth) and functional strength (distribution and utilization) and should be understood in the context of modernization. The world-wide movement of modernization through science has made scientific biomedicine become structurally superior to other medical traditions in virtually every contemporary society but its functional strength varies with the society's political-organizational and economic development. The national will to modernize through science has also resulted in many alternative traditions being increasingly absorbed into the scientific biomedical sector. The various efforts to revive alternative remedies may turn out to facilitate the process of both technical and organizational absorption by scientific biomedicine.