The Mainland Affairs Council yesterday urged China not to belittle Taiwan's status in the international community under the pretext of working to halt the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
"While we are more than happy to share with China our prevention experience against SARS, we however do not welcome any political gestures by Chinese officials to suppress Taiwan's status in the name of exchanging measures against SARS," council Vice Chairman Chen Ming-tong (
Chen made the remarks in response to a question about the recent willingness expressed by Chinese authorities to cooperate with Taiwan on cross-strait anti-SARS measures.
According to a report in Hong Kong's Mingpao daily, Chinese President Hu Jintao (
The ministry's departments should meet up with experts or academics from Hong Kong and Taiwan, if necessary, to look into measures on how to contain and curb SARS, the newspaper quoted Hu as saying.
"Taiwan's SARS cases were transmitted from China. It is by Taiwan's own effort that Taiwan has been recognized worldwide for its achievements in SARS prevention and treatment," Chen said.
He noted that so far the nation has maintained a "zero deaths, zero transmissions abroad and zero community transmissions" record with respect to SARS.
Chen said that it was through help from sources such as the World Health Organization, the US government and Hong Kong that the government was able to obtain information about SARS.
Saying that the country is willing to share SARS-related information with China and cooperate on the issue via the Straits Exchange Foundation and its Beijing-counterpart, the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, Chen complained that China was including Taiwan's SARS cases in its national SARS statistics.
"Taiwan is not a province under the People's Republic of China," Chen emphasized.
Meanwhile, Department of Health Deputy Director-General Lee Lung-teng (
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