The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday that its policy toward A(H1N1) influenza would change from trying to prevent it from entering the country to reducing its impact, following the WHO decision to upgrade its pandemic alert to level six.
“We will have domestic infections sooner or later. It is not necessary anymore for us to try to keep it out. It is now more important for us to reduce the impact,” Department of Health Minister Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) told a press conference at the CECC after a meeting in response to the WHO’s move.
Yeh said he was satisfied with what Taiwanese epidemiologists have done so far.
“We need more manpower to work on vaccine production so we need to stop certain anti-epidemic work,” Yeh said.
The minister promised that the vaccine would be ready by the autumn.
“Probably sometime in September,” he said.
Meanwhile, the CECC also announced the 37th confirmed domestic swine flu case yesterday. CECC spokesman Shih Wen-yi (施文儀) said that the patient was a 23-year-old female college student from a group who recently returned from Thailand.
Shih said that there was no need for people to cancel or postpone trips to foreign countries, but he urged tour guides and travel agencies not to plan outings to crowded public locations, such as nightclubs during trips.
Shih also reminded tour guides to help travelers should they start to show flu-like symptoms.
Failure to do so could lead to a fine of between NT$10,000 and NT$150,000.
“Once a tour guide discovers a group member is feeling unwell, the guide should immediately help them find a doctor. Tour guides will be fined if their negligence helps the spread of the virus,” Shih said.
“We found that all the college students who were infected in Thailand had been to dinner shows or local nightclubs. These places are quite risky, especially as there are more and more confirmed cases in Thailand,” Shih said.
In response to Yeh’s prediction that there would be a large-scale domestic infection in the future, Shih said there was nothing to fear.
“This is something we already knew and are already prepared for, so there is no need to panic,” Shih said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching