The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday held a closed-door meeting to devise a new plan of attack for next year's World Health Organization (WHO) bid, with some officials proposing to extend lobbying into a year-long campaign, sources said.
"We hope to extend the project into a year-long plan so as to build up momentum," said an insider, who wished to remain anonymous, after the two-hour talks.
Taiwan's bid to join the World Health Assembly (WHA) -- the top decision-making body of the WHO -- as an observer failed for the seventh year in a row last month after the steering committee of the annual WHA meeting decided not to put Taiwan's case on the assembly's agenda.
The discussion mapped out concrete steps for next year's campaign, sources at the meeting said.
As the US has acted in the nation's favor in numerous WHA proceedings this year, next year's attempt should focus on luring other countries into following the Americans' lead, officials said.
The US Secretary for Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson spoke for the first time in Taiwan's favor during WHA precedings, while US officials fought for the insertion of pro-Taiwan wordings into a SARS-related resolution that sailed through the WHA last month, officials said.
The resolution required the WHO director-general to "respond appropriately to all requests for WHO assistance for SARS surveillance, prevention, and control."
The foreign ministry saw the resolution as a legal basis for future contacts between the WHO and Taiwan.
The US took the lead in blocking Beijing's attempts to insert in the resolution a phrase that would have made WHO assistance subject to "approval of the national government concerned," a wording seen not in Taipei's favor, officials said.
Reviewing the situation on the European front, officials at the meeting targeted Ireland as one of the key countries to lobby in light of Dublin's scheduled rotating EU presidency that begins next years.
Officials also discussed possible ways to add manpower, either at the ministry or the representative office in Geneva, to handle the WHO case since complexity has been on the rise since the bid began in 1997, officials said.
Shen Lyu-shun (沈呂巡), chief of the Taipei Cultural and Economic mission in Geneva, Switzerland, also attended the meeting, before wrapping up his short visit to Taipei in the evening.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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