One of the pleasures of the great outdoors is enjoying the beautiful greenery.
However, it may not always be a good idea to bring flowers home, the Council of Agriculture’s (COA) Endemic Species Research Institute (ESRI) said yesterday.
The ESRI said it recently discovered that Parthenium, an aggressive, toxic weed traditionally found in central and southern Taiwan that looks like the plant Baby’s Breath, is migrating northward toward Miaoli County.
“Parthenium contains the toxin parthenin, which is harmful to both humans and animals,” ESRI assistant researcher Huang Shi-yuan (黃士元) said.
When the pollen is inhaled or contacted, parthenin induces an allergy in the respiratory system as well as skin rashes, Huang said.
While conditions such as rhinitis and bronchitis can result, the toxin has also been documented to cause liver dysfunctions in humans, or even mass deaths in livestock in Australia.
Parthenium was originally found in South America.
Because it is a hardy plant that survives in various climates, it has now spread throughout the world, including India, Australia and Taiwan, Huang said.
“We do not know the exact time that Parthenium was brought to the island, but its presence has been documented for at least two decades and was listed by the COA as a toxic plant in 1988,” he said, adding that the institute suspected that the weed’s seeds were accidentally imported along with edible grains.
What is alarming is that until recently, Parthenium was found only south of Taichung. But the plant has recently been found to occasionally grow in Miaoli, Huang said.
“Because its flowers look like Baby’s Breath, some people find them pretty and bring them home to plant. While right now the plant may not be a big problem, Parthenium is beginning to enter its flower season, from March to October, so it is important that people learn about it and destroy it in the wild, ” Huang 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:
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
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