Fifty-five percent of students at a top senior high school in Taipei get less than six hours of sleep per night, showing that the pressure of study has cut into their sleep time, according to the results of a survey released yesterday.
The survey, conducted by the Tri-Service General Hospital on 700 students at the school last April, also showed that 60 percent of the students go to bed after midnight.
Asked about the quality of their sleep, 49 percent of the students in their first year said that they have a hard time falling asleep, that they don't get enough sleep and that they don't get uninterrupted sleep. Nearly 60 percent of students in their second and third year, who will soon face college entrance examinations, said the same thing.
Mao Wei-chung (
He noted that a lack of quality sleep could affect a student's academic performance or plunge them into depression or anxiety. To make up for their poor academic performance resulting from a lack of quality sleep, many students try to put in even more hours, thus further cutting into their sleep time in what amounts to a vicious cycle, he said.
The survey also found that 0.8 percent of male students and 2.8 percent of female students have tried taking sleeping pills.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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