May 5, 2008, 10:23 GMT
Hong Kong - Data on more than 3,000 patients in Hong Kong public hospitals has been lost through the theft of computer memory sticks, officials said Monday.
Nine memory sticks have been stolen from five hospitals across the city of 6.9 million in the past year, the hospital authority's chief executive Shane Solomon said.
A task force headed by former privacy commissioner Stephen Lau has been set up to investigate the incidents and find ways of avoiding repeat occurrences, Solomon announced.
The revelation came weeks after the hospital authority admitted medical data on almost 700 Hong Kong youngsters with developmental problems had been lost on a stolen memory stick.
In that case, the lost data included detailed records of interviews with troubled youngsters, assessments and, in some cases, their photos, identity card numbers and addresses.
Solomon said he believed that most cases involving the lost memory sticks involved opportunistic theft by culprits who wanted the stick rather than the data it contained.
'It is not a matter of staff negligence,' he said. 'It is a matter of people seeing a USB stick sitting around in a computer and thinking 'I'll take that, thank you very much.''
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