The Center for Disease Control reported another case of dengue fever in Pingtung City's Changan borough yesterday, indicating that a clean-up campaign by both residents and health agencies had failed to contain an outbreak that occurred three weeks ago.
The latest victim, a 74-year-old male, is now receiving medical care and is quarantined in hospital. The center said that it did not identify the case during its first inspection last month because the man was not at home at the time.
According to health officials, a patchy household registration system and administrative problems in the borough made a comprehensive survey impossible.
"There are many old, rickety, abandoned houses in this sparsely populated borough. Some elderly and single people may go out and not return home for several days," said Wu Ping-fuai (吳炳輝), director of the center's division of quarantine and intervention activities.
The report showed that the patient in the latest case lives only 40m away from where the first case was reported on July 12.
"We have already fumigated the site and have taken samples from every location we can find, but there's still room for improvement," Wu said.
Mosquitoes can transmit the disease for eight to 12 days after biting a virus carrier. The disease's incubation period is five to eight days. If mosquito control measures were not strictly observed, Wu said, a second wave could follow two or three weeks after an initial outbreak.
Another obstacle to exterminating virus-carrying Aedes mosquitoes is rain.
Recent rains have filled discarded pots, tires and roof drainpipes in the south, providing ideal environments for the mosquitoes to breed.
The center called for the public to be more alert and urged residents to empty containers on a daily basis.
"It is the peak season for dengue fever now. Our efforts must be consistent or this will not be the last case," center deputy-general Lin Ting (
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