Department of Health Director-General Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) said yesterday that a recent study concluding that susceptibility to SARS can be related to genetics and that "southern Asians" are more susceptible to the disease lacked a scientific basis.
Chen made the remarks during a SARS prevention and relief monitoring committee meeting at the Legislative Yuan when he was asked about the study conducted by a hematologist at Mackay Memorial Hospital.
"The number of samples used in the study was too small," Chen said, adding that he believes the virus attacks human beings irrespective of their ethnicity.
Dr. Marie Lin (林媽利), of Mackay's Transfusion Medicine Laboratory, said Wednesday that after comparing hundreds of blood samples from SARS patients, she and her team found that people with the human leucocype antigen (HLA)-B46 gene are more likely to fall victim to SARS, while people with the HLA-B13 gene are relatively immune to the SARS virus.
Lin said that about 10 percent of Taiwan's population has the HLA-B46 gene, and that these people share the same gene as other "southern Asians," including people from China's Guangdong and Fujian provinces, and people from Hong Kong, Singapore and parts of Vietnam, where people have maintained close genetic connections over the past 400 years.
Taiwan's Aborigines, as well as Caucasians and African people, do not have the SARS-prone HLA-B46 gene, according to Lin.
Chen said that the public need not heed the study, adding that the basic approach is still to take precautions against the disease, whatever one's origins or ethnicity.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS