The Taitung Blood Center, which serves hospitals in southeastern Taiwan, is urging the public to donate blood to help relieve a serious shortage.
Lee Han-chun (李瀚璿), director of the center, told reporters yesterday that the center’s stockpile of various types of blood had fallen far below the critical level and could last for only two days.
He said that the center had no stock of whole blood apart from two units of Type B blood. The stock of platelets is exhausted, while the stock of red blood cells is down to 49 units of Type A blood, 30 units of Type B blood, 56 units of Type O blood and 55 units of Type AB blood.
Meanwhile, members of a local chapter of Lions Club International and four other organizations have been encouraging people to join a two-day blood donation campaign starting today by offering to reward each donation of 250cc blood with a NT$100 convenience store coupon, along with gift coupons for a natural hot spring spa for the first 100 donors.
Staffers at the Taitung Blood Center said that donors must be healthy, aged between 17 and 65 and meet the requirement of a minimum 50kg in weight for males and 45kg for females.
A person meeting all requirements can donate whole blood every 56 days, platelets twice a week at an interval of 48 hours, and platelets and red blood cells together every 56 days.
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:
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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