Taiwan yesterday banned the importation of wild dogs and cats and several other types of animal from Thailand after a number of tigers in a Thai zoo ate chickens infected with bird flu and died, the Council of Agriculture said yesterday.
Beginning yesterday, the council's Bureau of Animal and Plant Inspection and Quarantine stopped issuing health certificates to importers of animals such as tigers, lions, foxes and wolves.
Bureau officials said yesterday that urgent information released by the World Organization for Animal Health on Tuesday confirmed that 55 of 441 tigers at zoos that ate chickens infected with the virus had fallen ill. So far, 23 have died.
"All signs show that the deadly bird flu is still spreading in Thailand. We have to be cautious," bureau official Tu Wen-jane (
situation critical
Tu said that the situation in other countries remains critical because the virus has been detected in not only chickens but also pigs, birds and a few types of cat that eat raw chicken -- including pets and zoo tigers.
"But people here need not panic because Taiwan has not imported wild animals from Thailand for years," Tu said.
Pet dogs and cats are still allowed to be imported from Thailand. However, animal quarantine regulations have become more strict since Oct. 4. Officials said that pet cats and dogs are not allowed to be exported from Thailand without first undergoing a 21-day quarantine period, during which a test for the bird-flu virus must be negative.
After arriving in Taiwan, these pet cats and pet dogs stay in quarantine for a further 21 days. Checkups continue for six months after they are released.
Bureau officials said that more than 100 million chickens have died or have been culled because of bird flu since the beginning of this year in Asian countries including Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.
crisis
Both the UN Food and Agricul-ture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health consider the bird-flu epidemic a "crisis of global importance" that will continue to demand the attention of the international community for many years to come.
So far, available records show that 31 out of 41 people affected by the virus in Thailand and Vietnam have died.
Bureau officials stressed yesterday that Taiwan remains unaffected by the virus and that the public should be aware that smuggling of animals and birds might jeopardize epidemic prevention efforts.
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