Taiwan has the highest rate of blood donation among all the countries in Asia, the Taiwan Blood Services Foundation said yesterday.
Foundation chairman Lin Kuo-hsin (林國信) said that people donated a total of 2.39 million 250ml bags of blood last year, representing a donation rate of 7.86 percent, a figure that tops all other countries in Asia.
Donors with the blood type O positive accounted for 43.56 percent of the total number last year — the highest percentage of donors that year among the different blood groups, the foundation said.
BLOOD DRIVE
The foundation held a carnival-style blood drive on Sunday at its six blood centers around the country in observance of World Blood Donor Day, which is marked annually on June 14.
Lin said that millions of people around the world owe their lives to individuals they will never meet — people who donate their blood to help others.
To drive home the message that blood donation is not limited by borders, Lin said, the foundation invited five foreign donors to tell their stories.
A slender woman from the US who has been in Taiwan for the last 25 years and teaches English at National Taiwan University, said she was not allowed to donate blood in the US because of her weight, but could do so in Taiwan because she meets the minimum weight requirement of 45kg.
A French professor at Tamkang University said he began donating blood at the age of 19, and that after he got married and had children in Taiwan, he continued to donate blood as a way of showing his love for the country.
A Japanese woman, who has been living in Taiwan for nine years, said that giving blood is good for the health of the donor, in addition to the obvious value to the recipients.
‘ONE FAMILY’
An Indian man from Mumbai who has lived in Taiwan for 30 years said he has given blood in Taiwan “too many times to remember.”
He said it was amazing that God had created people of different nationalities but given them all the same blood types so they could share.
“Whether American, French, Japanese, or Taiwanese, the people on Earth are one family,” he said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift