The ban on poultry imports from Japan has remained in force since January last year, a Council of Agriculture official in charge of animal quarantine and inspection affairs said yesterday.
The official made the remarks after the Japanese government announced over the weekend that bird flu has been detected in chickens at a farm in northeastern Japan and that restrictions have been imposed on shipments of poultry and eggs from the area.
"We have enforced a ban on Japanese poultry imports since H5N1 bird flu infections were confirmed in that country in January 2004," the official said, adding that the ban has not once been lifted since that time.
Amid reports of new bird flu infections in Japan, the council will heighten its alert and step up inspection and quarantine measures to avert any avian flu-infected poultry from entering the country, the official said.
The Japanese government said Sunday that more than 800 chickens at a farm in Mitsukaido City in Ibaraki Prefecture, located just northeast of Tokyo, have died since April, and recent tests on some found they were infected with the H5N2 strain of bird flu.
H5N2 is regarded as less dangerous strain of the bird flu virus compared to the H5N1 strain, which has led to the death and slaughter of tens of millions of birds across Asia since late 2003. The H5N1 strain has also crossed over to humans, killing 38 people in Vietnam, 12 in Thailand and four in Cambodia over the past couple of years.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
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