APAGE Guidelines on the Management of Inflammatory Bowel Disease during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Dear Council Members and Members of APAGE Member Societies,

On behalf of the Executive Committee of APAGE, we hope you are keeping well during this trying period of this unprecedented pandemic. Please stay safe and we will continue to do our best for our patients and yet keep our fellow colleagues and ourselves safe.

In this moment of crisis, the APAGE Workgroup on IBD has worked on a document for our Asian gastroenterologists. It is entitled, “Guidelines on the Management of Inflammatory Bowel Disease during the COVID-19 Pandemic”. The core writing committee consisted of Drs Khoon-Lin Ling (Singapore), Raja Affendi (Kuala Lumpur), Ida Hilmi (Kuala Lumpur), Rupert Leong (Sydney), Zhi-Hua Ran (Shanghai), Vineet Ahuja (New Delhi), Siew-Chien Ng (Hong Kong) and Choon-Jin Ooi (Singapore). The final document was vetted by the rest of the members of the Workgroup. Attached is the document for your information. We understand much of the guidance is based on consensus as evidence is still emerging. The Workgroup will continue to update document periodically. Future updated documents can be assessed at http://www.apage.org/covid19.html.

Additionally, there are links to selected resources from various international bodies for cross reference. Finally, we would also like to highlight a database registry called SECURE-IBD (https://covidibd.org/) to help record IBD patients who suffer from COVID-19.

We shall be grateful if you could kindly disseminate this information by email-blast to members of your organization and upload the attached document together with the html link on your official website.

We wish one and all every success in curbing this virus.

Sincerely,

Professor Dai-Ming Fan

President, APAGE

Associate Professor Choon-Jin Ooi

Vice-President, APAGE

& Lead, APAGE Workgroup on IBD

Professor Justin Che-Yuen Wu

Secretary-General, APAGE

Professor Tooru Shimosegawa

Treasurer, APAGE