A teenage Taiwanese girl who received a transplant of peripheral blood stem cells donated by a person from China last month is doing well after spending two weeks at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital, medical sources said yesterday.
The girl has not rejected the transplant, there is no inflammation and the cancer cells that were in her blood before the transplant are gone, said Chiu Tsung-chieh (邱宗傑), a doctor at the hospital's Blood and Tumor Department.
more monitoring
Chiu said that although the peripheral blood stem cell transplant was successful and the patient can be discharged tomorrow, it would take three months of monitoring the patient's condition to ensure a severe rejection does not occur.
In addition, recipients of peripheral blood stem cell transplants need to be observed for a further one to two years to ensure that a chronic rejection does not develop, Chiu said.
The 15-year-old Taipei girl, who suffers from inherited anemia, was one of two Taiwanese recipients of peripheral blood stem cells donated by two Chinese women last month, thanks to the efforts of the Dao Pei Hospital in Beijing and Taiwan's Tzu Chi Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Center.
also fine
The other recipient, who received a similar transplant at Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, was also reportedly doing fine after the operation.
It marked the first case in which Chinese citizens had donated peripheral blood stem cells for Taiwanese recipients.
Several Taiwanese citizens have donated bone marrow to Chinese recipients over the past few years under arrangements made by the Tzu Chi Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Center.
asia's largest
The center -- the largest of its kind in Asia -- has built up a databank of approximately 300,000 bone marrow samples since its inception in 1993 and has helped more than 300 victims of blood diseases to find a donor.
The center now has access to data on more than 10 million donors worldwide after linking up with two bone marrow data banks in the US and Germany late last year.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift