Government agencies yesterday vowed to encourage the public to donate their bodies to science in a bid to resolve the perennial shortage of cadavers for medical schools and research centers.
Traditional Chinese religious beliefs hold that the bodies of virtuous individuals should be kept intact after death for the sake of their ancestors and offspring.
DPP Legislator Lai Ching-te (賴清德) held a public hearing yesterday to discuss the government's collection of unidentified dead bodies, including those of alleged vagrants, for research purposes. Officials from the Ministry of the Interior and the Department of Health as well as representatives of human rights groups and medical experts attended the press conference.
Currently, 54 percent of corpses collected for medical research are donated, while 46 percent -- unidentified and unclaimed corpses -- are collected by special departments within medical schools.
The collection of unidentified corpses, however, has been criticized by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR), which says that the Statute Governing the Dissection of Corpses (
Under the statute, local police stations or local health departments are entitled to assign bodies that have not been claimed or identified by relatives to medical schools in their districts.
These bodies can be used for anatomy classes and research one month after a death certificate has been issued.
"Even organ donations demand personal approval, so how can the government handle bodies in this way? These bodies are unidentified. The people are not able to express their own desires, but this doesn't mean that anyone else is entitled to make decisions for them," said Wang Hsin-jen (
However, representatives from the Bequeathed Body Center (
Wang Shu-mei (
Lee Lin-feng (
However, Chou Huai-lien (
The Buddhist Compassion Relief Tsu Chi Foundation has promoted body donations and has had than 6,000 people sign up to donate their bodies. The foundation distributes the bodies to various medical schools in Taiwan.
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