A three-member team from the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) departed Taipei yesterday for the earthquake and tsunami-hit area of Medan, Indonesia, to help bolster post-disaster disinfection work.
The team is bringing a number of automatic disinfectant dispensers to Medan and will look into how efficiently the Indonesian authorities have been using 100 semi-automatic sprayers and 50kg condenser disinfectants that Taiwan sent there last week, the team's leader, Yuan Shao-ying (
An additional 200 dispensers are ready to be sent if they are needed, Yuan said.
The EPA is also planning additional assistance of NT$30 million (US$937,500) to provide sprayers, pesticides, disinfectants and protective gear, he said.
Yuan's team members are Chang Chih-ying (張志應), a disinfection professional, and Lin Hsi-chin (林錫金), an official with the Taipei City Government's Environmental Protection Bureau in charge of disinfection affairs.
Taiwan has continued to send cash aid, medical supplies and relief goods to Indonesia since Dec. 26, even though the Indonesian government turned down Taiwan's request to take part in an international conference held in Jakarta Jan. 6 to coordinate relief efforts for the tsunami-hit nations around the Indian Ocean.
Indonesia was the hardest-hit nation in the Dec. 26 magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the western city of Banda Aceh and the ensuing tsunami. More than half of the estimated 150,000 people around the Indian Ocean that were killed in the devastation were in Indonesia. The tsunami also caused unprecedented damage in many other countries in the region.
Taiwan, which has promised US$50 million in aid to the disaster-hit nations, is the world's eighth-largest single donor thus far.
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