■ HEALTH
Rare fungal fever reported
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported an imported case of valley fever, diagnosed in a Taiwanese woman who returned recently from the US. It is the country’s third ever recorded case of valley fever, a fungal infection. The previous two cases, also imported, were recorded in 2005 and 1991, the CDC said. The latest case involved a 30-year-old woman who had been in the US for a year and returned last month. The infection was diagnosed on Wednesday through blood tests, the CDC said. Valley fever is caused by Coccidioides immitis, a fungus commonly found in the soil of desert regions in the US, Mexico and Central and South America, the CDC said. Infection can occur if fungus spores in the air are inhaled, but the disease can not be spread from person to person. While many carriers display no symptoms, some may develop fever, cough, chills, joint aches, chest pain, rashes and other symptoms. If a patient’s reaction is severe, the fever can be fatal.
■ CONSUMER SAFETY
Diseased meat tracked
To ensure that meat from diseased pigs does not reach the market, all farmers who own more than 2,000 pigs will need to present waste disposal information for approval from Oct. 1, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday. The regulation change will include an extra 300 pig farms under the approval system for waste disposal, it said. Since 1998, the EPA has worked to track diseased meat to ensure that the waste goes to incinerators and not meat markets. Since 2000, the EPA has required that pig farms with more than 3,000 animals report on their disposal of the carcasses of pigs that die of disease.
■ POPULATION
Births fall to new low
The number of babies born in Taiwan last year was less than 200,000, a new low, figures from the Ministry of the Interior showed. The statistics, released earlier this week, showed that 196,486 babies were born last year, a drop of 3.5 percent from 2007. Some 9.6 percent of the mothers were foreigners, down 0.6 percentage points from 2007. Most of the women who gave birth last year were between 25 and 34 years old. The average age of women giving birth was 29.8. As the average age of marriage rises, the average age of women who gave birth for the first time rose last year to 28.9, compared with 26.4 in 1998, the figures showed.
■ HEALTH
MOFA issues alerts
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday issued “yellow” travel alerts for Ukraine, Malaysia, French Polynesia and Trinidad and Tobago over newly confirmed cases of swine flu in those countries. The ministry said in a statement that by issuing the alert — the lowest level of a three-color travel advisory scale — it was advising citizens traveling to those countries to take health precautions. At the same time, the ministry retracted its yellow travel advisory for Hungary, given that no new cases of swine flu had emerged there, it said. Taiwan has issued yellow alerts for 67 countries and regions that have reported cases of swine flu. Meanwhile, health authorities confirmed two more cases of swine flu on Thursday, bringing to 16 the total number of influenza A(H1N1) infections recorded in the country. There have been no deaths from swine flu.
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