The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus slammed the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday, accusing the organization of failing to react sooner to a nationwide outbreak of conjunctivitis.
At a press conference in the legislature, KMT Legislator Hsieh Kuo-liang (
"At the very beginning of the outbreak, the DOH and the CDC regarded the cases as regular conjunctivitis and it never occurred to them that other kinds of bacteria could have been responsible. Therefore, they did not take the outbreak seriously," Hsieh said.
PHOTO: CNA
Hsieh said the outbreak first hit Keelung and Yunlin on Oct. 4, but the CDC did not collect samples from patients to determine the cause of the condition until Oct. 8 although several thousand pinkeye cases had been reported.
The CDC confirmed on Thursday that Coxackievirus type 24, an enterovirus, was responsible.
"A CDC official told me in private that Coxackievirus type 24 once infected 40 percent of the residents of a town abroad. That is to say, the virus has the ability to infect up to 40 percent [of a population]," Hsieh said, asking if a similar situation could occur in Taiwan.
"[The DOH and CDC] completely ignored the possible serious consequences of such an acute disease," Hsieh said, adding that the conjunctivitis outbreak has spread to Taipei and Kaohsiung.
Steve Kuo (
Kuo said that Coxackievirus type 24 contributed to a similar outbreak in Central and South America between August and October 2003, during which time hundreds of thousands of people were infected, although the infection rarely caused serious health problems.
Kuo said 10,510 students nationwide had been infected with the disease as of Friday with cases concentrated in Keelung, Yunlin, Taipei, Kaohsiung and Chiayi.
"What is alarming is that the outbreak implies that people in the country still have poor health habits," Kuo said.
Starting yesterday for three weeks, Taipei City schools must report cases of pinkeye to help track the outbreak, a city government education official said yesterday.
Department of Education Director Wu Ching-chi (
Additional reporting by CNA
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