Department of Health (DOH) Director-General Chen Chien-jen (程建仁) said yesterday he hopes Taiwan can be removed from the World Health Organization's (WHO) travel advisory list by June 20.
Chen said Taiwan must meet five criteria to qualify for removal from the list: The daily new SARS caseload must fall below five; the number of hospitalized SARS patients must be less than 60; the outbreak must show signs of waning; no cross-border transmissions must be reported; and all probable cases must be traced to their origins.
According to tallies compiled by the DOH's Center for Disease Control (CDC), the number of newly reported SARS cases has remained stable at around 10 per day for the past week and only five or less are classified as probable SARS cases. Nevertheless, the CDC reported 50 probable cases yesterday.
CDC Director Su Yi-jen (
Su said hospitalized patients who have tested negative for SARS will be moved out of negative pressure quarantine wards over the next few days.
As of yesterday morning, Taiwan had tallied 660 probable SARS cases, including 81 related deaths. Most of yesterday's 50 reported new cases were reclassified from suspected cases.
In preparation for a 10-day nationwide temperature-taking campaign that will kick off Sunday as part of the SARS prevention campaign, Su said his center has distributed ear thermometers to grassroots ward chief offices to facilitate enforcement of the program.
The campaign is aimed at encouraging people to have their temperatures taken twice a day to help detect potential SARS carriers early enough to contain the spread of the disease. Fever is one of the early symptoms of SARS.
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