Experts from both sides of the Taiwan Strait said yesterday that they are worried about people who are carriers of the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus who do not have full-blown symptoms but can infect others with the potentially deadly disease.
They expressed their misgivings during a discussion of the campaign against SARS held via video conference in Taipei, Beijing and Guangdong Province simultaneously.
Both Lin Chou-yen (
Lin said that more than 10 children are reported to have contracted SARS in Taiwanese hospitals, although only three cases had been confirmed. He said one of the children was probably infected through a relative who had earlier traveled to China.
However, he went on, the relative had not developed any symptoms of SARS, which he said is a most worrying development in the campaign against SARS.
Xia said that the sources of infection of many of the SARS patients in Guangdong have yet to be found, while the participants also discussed whether the spread of the virus could be related to the temperature.
Zhong Nanshan (
Lee Ping-ying (李秉穎), a pediatrician at National Taiwan University Hospital asked whether a recent decrease in SARS patients in some Chinese provinces might have had anything to do with the temperature.
According to Zhong, the virus develops rapidly at between 17 and 260 C, but will become dormant at lower temperatures and will die if the temperature reaches 500 C.
However, he stressed that this is only an initial assessment and much more evidence is needed before the theory can be supported.
Yang Weizhong (
Zhong, from southern Guangdong province where the SARS virus is believed to have originated, said yesterday outbreaks of the disease might be subsiding because people are developing antibodies after being exposed to the virus.
The outbreak in Guangdong eased in mid-February after authorities there enforced stringent quarantines and placed seriously ill patients in a better equipped hospital, said Zhong, who heads the Guangzhou Pulmonary Disease Research Institute.
But Zhong said many doctors and nurses who had cared for patients for weeks did not contract the illness, while staff from other hospitals that hadn't been exposed to the virus for long periods fell ill, he said.
"We wonder if some people develop antibodies and become immune to the disease," he 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:
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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