A group of people who lived in a building contaminated by radiation for more than a decade called for free access to healthcare yesterday.
Thousands of victims condemned the government for dragging its feet in enacting a ban on radioactive materials in housing construction. In the early 1980s, reinforcement bars contaminated with Cobalt-60 were used in the construction of more than 100 buildings in Taiwan. The situation was not publicly known until August 1992, when the government confirmed that several buildings in Taipei City contained radioactive material.
An investigation later suggested that roughly 180 buildings nationwide -- including office buildings and schools -- had radioactive materials. To date, it is estimated that more than 10,000 people, including short-term tenants and workers at related iron and steel works, have been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.
At a gathering of the Radiation Safety Protection Association in Taipei yesterday, spokesman Wang Yu-lin (
Wang said that special measures dealing with radiation victims had been drafted by the council and would be reviewed by the Legislative Yuan in the September session. Wang also noted many victims feel the government lacks the will to deal with the issue, as compensation would be only given to those who developed cancer as a result of the exposure to radiation.
"Drafted measures only entitle the victims to receive a free annual health examination. This is unfair," Wang said.
Wang said what victims actually need is lifetime access to medical resources to monitoring their health and sound health education.
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