A majority of the mineral waters on sale across the nation are not worth the price consumers are paying for them because it is impossible to verify claims made about them, a legislator said yesterday.
"It's a very strange state of affairs when some branded mineral waters are more expensive than gasoline," Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lee Chen-nan (
"Now 95-octane unleaded gasoline costs NT$28.6 (US$0.858) per liter, but some brands of mineral water cost more than NT$30 or even NT$40 a bottle," he said.
Unverified
Lee said that while expensive mineral waters frequently claim to possess a variety of health benefits none of the claims used in the advertising or promoting of the waters has been proven to be true by the government authorities.
"Officials from the Water Resource Agency of the Ministry of Economic Affairs told me that a brand of mineral water which claims it contains certain microelements cannot be verified as the concentration of the micro-elements is too low," Lee said.
He added that advertisements for a number of mineral waters were misleading.
"One particular brand of mineral water claims to come from a source in snow-capped mountains, but actually, it is from the Snow Mountain (
Highs and lows
"Another brand of mineral water claims in its publicity that it possesses a pH value as high as 9.0," he said.
"But it fails to explain to consumers that the pH value of the water will go down if it is exposed to the sun or if the water has been stored for a long time," he said.
The legislator called on the government to introduce financial penalties for producers of mineral water who are unable to prove that the quality of their water is as good as claimed in advertisements.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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