Health experts yesterday warned parents to be aware of germs that could be lurking on their children's handkerchiefs.
According to a study released yesterday, a handkerchief used for more than one day can accumulate more than 100,000 bacteria.
The study, conducted among kindergarten children in Taipei City, was carried out by assistant professor Chen Yao-kuan (陳耀寬) of the Chao Yang University of Technology, a report in the Chinese-language paper, the United Evening News said.
According to the report, it said the study had found that 60 percent of the handkerchief samples tested were found to harbor colon bacillus and staphylococcus aureaus, bacteria that could cause diarrhea and skin infections.
Chen was quoted by the paper as saying that the amount of bacteria on a handkerchief that has been used for one day is three times as much as that found on a piece of two-day old meat.
"Handkerchiefs can accumulate a lot of bacteria when used to wipe away sweat or to clean hands, faces and mouths. A handkerchief used for one day is basically a piece of dirty cloth," Chen said, urging parents to be alert to the spread of enterovirus, a common illness in summer among young children.
He suggested disposable wet wipe tissues as the best alternatives to handkerchiefs to guarantee sanitation if handkerchiefs are not washed after a day's use.
Wet wipes can also guarantee good hand hygiene, he said.
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