While public toilets are not usually a big consideration when most people make travel plans, they are often a deciding factor — and sometimes a matter of life and death — for the physically challenged.
“Whether there are fully accessible public toilets at a destination is a big deal when I’m making the decision to go out or stay home,” said James Liu (劉金鍾), a board member of the League of Welfare Organizations for the Disabled who is partially paralyzed and relies on a wheelchair for movement following a spinal-cord injury.
He made the remark at a press conference yesterday held to reveal a list of 1,285 accessible public toilets around the country. Initiated by the Association for Promotion of Handicap Accessibility (APHA), the project was competed with the help of more than 1,000 volunteers from the China Youth Corps who did a one-month survey of the nation’s toilets.
Without accessible public toilets, Liu said, he sometimes had to sit in his car, cover the lower part of his body with a towel and urinate into a bottle or a bag.
For more complicated needs, “I could only ask for help from my wife,” Liu said, adding that he has seen physically challenged women using umbrellas for cover because they were unable to find accessible toilets.
“It’s very embarrassing for us — it’s humiliating,” Liu said.
Liu said that many people try to take care of the toilet issue before leaving their homes, with some “trying not to drink anything outside or holding it if necessary.”
APHA chairman Chen Kuo-chia (陳國嘉) recounted stories from his experience.
“One time I traveled to Japan with a group of physically challenged people and a girl in the group had to hold her water from 9am when she left the hotel until 6pm when she finally got back to the hotel because she couldn’t find any accessible toilets,” Chen said.
In another case, a handicapped person traveling in Sydney, Australia, had to be rushed to the hospital after holding it for an entire day.
“The doctor found that he had 2 liters of water in his bladder — normally a person can hold only up to 0.8 liter,” Chen said.
“The doctor said his bladder could have exploded if he held it any longer,” Chen said.
As a result, Liu said, 40 percent of paralyzed members in his organization suffer from some kind of urinary infection.
“You could lose your life that way,” he said. “There are only about 1 million handicapped people in the country, but if you count those who become disabled because of old age, then the total number of physically challenged people reaches around 2 million.”
“We’re in a rapidly aging society and the elderly will account for 20 percent of the population by year 2026 — that’s a lot of people and any of you could be in need for these facilities by then,” he said.
Although toilets for the physically challenged are available at many public places, “a lot of them “are not really accessible; they were built only to meet legal requirements,” Chen said.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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