An AIDS charity yesterday said that some local government-run social welfare departments and non-governmental organizations (NGO) were refusing to care for babies born to HIV-positive mothers before they were 18 months old, the age at which HIV tests are deemed reliable.
"Our facilities can only handle kids up to a year old," said May Chyou (
"When the babies turn one year old and have tested negative for HIV, we try and get social welfare departments and other NGOs to take over. But on some occasions we have been turned down on the grounds that they cannot be certain the child is HIV-negative until he or she is 18 months old," she said.
Chyou declined to give the names of the departments and organizations involved.
The Department of Health, she said, should apprise welfare organizations of the improved quality of testing so that they will agree to take HIV-negative babies from one year of age.
Asked for comments, Center for Disease Control deputy director Lin Ding (
"But that's beside the point. HIV should not be a criteria in these cases, period," Lin told the Taipei Times during a telephone interview. "Institutions have no business asking whether a baby is HIV-positive before giving it the care it requires. In fact, it is illegal."
Under the recently amended AIDS Control Act (
Chyou, however, said that in reality, fear and prejudice of HIV-positive people and babies cannot be legislated away.
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
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS