DO MEN HAVE A HIGHER CASE FATALITY RATE OF SEVERE ACUTE RESPIRATORY SYNDROME THAN WOMEN DO?
William Goggins Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong In a recent issue of the Journal, Karlberg et al. (1) reported on an analysis of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) data from Hong Kong. The authors found a substantial and statistically significantly higher mortality rate for males than for females, which persisted after adjustment for patient age. We wish to report the results of an analysis of similar data from the Taiwan Center for Disease Control (2). After reclassification of the data by World Health Organization case definition and after polymerase chain reaction and SARS antibody testing, the total number of SARS cases in Taiwan during last year s epidemic was 346; 73 (21.1 percent) of these patients died, either directly from SARS or from a SARS-related cause (2). The overall mortality rate was higher than that reported for Hong Kong (17.0 percent) (1), and the difference was close to significance (p = 0.079). Wh
