Ten members of a Taiwanese religious group have been infected with dengue fever while taking part in relief efforts in Myanmar in the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis.
It is the first time that a mass imported dengue fever infection has been recorded in Taiwan in recent years, a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) official said on Tuesday.
The cases were discovered after one of the patients, a 48-year-old Taipei County woman, sought treatment earlier this month at the Far Eastern Memorial Hospital.
She was diagnosed on July 18 with dengue fever, according to CDC deputy director-general Shih Wen-yi (施文儀) said.
A subsequent investigation conducted by health authorities found that she and 10 other members of a religious group she belongs to had visited Myanmar to help after the disaster and that 10 of the 11-member mission had been infected with the disease in Myanmar and had already fallen ill while in the Southeast Asian country, Shih said.
The patients are aged between 48 and 87 and come from Taipei County, Taipei City, Taoyuan County and Changhua County, Shih said.
The CDC official said the center is still awaiting the results of a third test on a remaining member of the mission, who tested negative for dengue fever in two previous tests.
As the religious group is planning to send another mission to Myanmar in September, the CDC has advised it to improve health education for its members and to take precautionary measures against volunteers contracting the disease, he said.
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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