I have a costly cheap watch. Don’t think that I am
contradicting myself. I divide watches
into cheap and costly ones. Mine belongs
to the cheap category. However, within
the cheap category, it is a relatively costly one. (Well, in the costly category, some do look
cheap.) Because it is a costly cheap
watch, it is naturally a mechanical watch. Cheap cheap watches are usually electronic. Apart from requiring change of batteries once
in a blue moon, electronic watches are quite accurate. They do not need winding or constant wearing
to keep them working. For mechanical
watches, cheap and costly alike, they need to transform movements into stored
energy to keep them functioning. Thus,
if you have more than one watch, unless you put all your watches in a fancy
winding machine, you need to adjust the time of your watch every occasion you
switch to a not-so-often-worn one. For
convenient sake, and for another obvious reason, I only wear one watch. Although it self-winds and works continuously,
I still need to adjust it every week. This
is because it gains just less than a minute a day, and I can only tolerate
inaccuracy up to 5 minutes. Since it is
in the cheap watch category, I guess it would not be too helpful to have it
repaired or tuned.
Day in, day out, I begin to get
lost. It seems that I have to adjust the
watch too frequently. Another
observation comes from my writing for a small column in a newspaper 4 days a
week. I submit 4 articles altogether
every Thursday. How come I have a
feeling that I am writing them non-stop? For clinical work, in the e-Health system, all
of a sudden I find the item for Elderly Vaccination Subsidy Scheme again. Doesn’t the Scheme only begin every November? Then I notice an alert telling me that I have
not changed my log-in password of the Scheme for 654 days. That is nearly 2 years! When I fill in the details of a patient, I
realize that the pretty lady whom I saw when my clinic started is now eligible
for the subsidy.
Is time moving faster? Well, it is possible. Time is not something absolute, and some even
doubt its existence. Einstein, the
father of relativity, once said that the bad speaker in a lecture he attended
had given eternity a new definition. When
I try to retrieve the quote, I realize that I read the book Einstein when Steve
Jobs died. And that was October 2011,
more than 2 years ago.
Then I realize that it is early
December 2013. It is time to write an
Editorial for the News. Why not write a
review on the happenings in 2013? I did
that before. But that were in 2008, 2009 and 2010. When I try to recall what were the big pieces
of news in 2013, I get totally confused. SARS was 10 years ago in 2003. H1N1 and hotel quarantine was in 2009. This year was my turn to re-elect for Council
Member of the HKMA. I was ipso facto
re-elected. When I collected the souvenir
for my service from 2010 to 2013 in the AGM, I remembered that I had fractured
my left elbow when I was presented a similar souvenir at an earlier time. And that was 6 years ago! Has anyone muddled with the time machine and
stolen from us, or at least from me? Then
I recall the fact that despite so many events in between, we are still in the
second year of our Chief Executive’s term of service. Our time has not been stolen. It is only relativity in play. The followings are my picks for 2013 after
confirming that they really happened in this year.
The Nobel Prize and alike
- They are listed in case people think that doctors should know about them. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2013 was jointly awarded to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof for “their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells.”
- The Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine was jointly awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young for “their discoveries of molecular mechanisms underlying circadian rhythms.”
- The Ig Nobel Prize (which is an American parody of the Nobel Prizes) in Medicine was awarded to "Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells" by Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi. The scientists assessed the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant mice.
The infections
- On December 2, the CHP confirmed the first case of H7N9 bird flu in Hong Kong. 17 close contacts of the patient have been quarantined and prescribed with Tamiflu prophylaxis, and over 200 other contacts of the patient had been placed under observation. On December 6, another case was confirmed.
- Two children died of Streptococcus pneumonia serotype 3 infection within two weeks in November. Parents became panic when there was an opinion that children who had received the older generation vaccines PCV-7 and PCV-10 would be more susceptible to infection from serotype 3. After a bit of confusing opinions, the CHP decided to subsidize children under 6 who had not received any PCV-13 to have a booster via the Childhood Vaccination Subsidy Scheme.
- In May, the novel coronavirus (nCoV) was named the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) by the Coronavirus Study Group of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. MERS-CoV confirmed cases continued to be reported from different countries in Middle East, Europe and North Africa throughout the year.
The Hospital Authority
- In December, Prof. John LEONG Chi-yan succeeded Mr. Anthony WU Ting-yuk to be the Chairman of Hospital Authority.
- On August 21, the Government announced the setting up of a Steering Committee to carry out an overall review of the Hospital Authority. There was no representative from the HKMA.
The Universities
- Professor Francis CHAN Ka-leung became the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in January.
- Professor Gabriel Matthew LEUNG became the Dean of the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at The University of Hong Kong in August.
- Prof. YU Cheuk-man, Head of Cardiology of the Faculty of Medicine of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was suspended from performing vascular interventional procedures after there were internal complaints on his performance. He disputed and investigations are still in progress.
The human rights
- In April, Dr. York CHOW Yat-ngok, former Secretary for Food and Health, became the new chairperson of the Equal Opportunities Commission. He hoped to make progress on legislation outlawing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, and to protect same sex marriage as it was “a matter of human right”.
- In September 25, the Action Committee Against Narcotics (ACAN) issued a consultation paper on the RESCUE Drug Testing Scheme. This was a compulsory drug testing scheme infringing on basic human rights. In November, the HKMA held a press conference to state our firm stance against this scheme. It was described as 「藥石亂投」. The Apple Daily elected this scheme as one of the big 10 news concerning human rights in Hong Kong in the year 2013.
(Source: HKMA News December 2013)
