In the light of international World AIDS Day tomorrow, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday said that it will focus on women in its official anti-AIDS campaign that starts today, and urge condom use in marital sex.
"Over the past years, the glo-bal pandemic has also caught up with married women here," said Lai An-chi (賴安琪), a section chief of the CDC's division for AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
The CDC's figures showed that, a decade ago, only about one to three couples became infected with HIV every year.
During the past decade, however, about 10 couples every year were diagnosed as HIV positive.
According to official statistics, the biggest increase in cases has been among women aged between 20 and 39, and most of them contracted the virus from their husbands.
Since the reporting system was launched in 1988, 163 couples had been monitored. Yet health officials cautioned that this figure could be deceptive.
"The ratio between males and females infected with HIV is roughly 4:1. However, the high known infection rate among males may be partly contributed to screening tests performed in military health checkups," Lai said.
In Taiwan, military service of 20 months is compulsory. In theory, every Taiwanese man undergoes an HIV test at least once upon joining the army.
In the case of women, however, there is no nationwide screening test. Only Taipei City and Taoyuan County provide free HIV screening tests for pregnant women.
Many HIV-infected women may thus escape notice.
Health officials urged women to be more alert in guarding themselves against the disease.
"Women are more physically susceptible to HIV infection than men," Lai said.
Citing the latest WHO report, Lai said that male-to-female HIV transmission during sex is about twice as likely to occur than female-to-male transmission.
The underlying problem, health officials said, is the low level of AIDS awareness among married couples.
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