Scores of activists protested in front of the Department of Health yesterday to show their opposition to an anticipated full opening of Taiwan’s market to US beef.
The protesters urged the government to hold public hearings before making a final decision.
After learning from reports that the government is preparing to ease restrictions on US beef imports, activists from a number of civic groups said that the government should not sacrifice the public’s health for the sake of political and economic benefits.
The government currently only allows the import of boneless beef from cattle under 30 months of age, but may lift or ease the constraints under intense lobbying from the US government.
Likening opening the market to US beef exports to arms procurement, Green Party Taiwan Spokesman Pan Han-shen (潘翰聲) said that both involve politics and that the government should not put public health at risk for short-term gains, including the possibility of negotiating and signing a Taiwan-US free-trade agreement.
Hu Ya-mei (胡雅美), president of the Homemakers’ Union and Foundation, said that prion proteins, the agents that cause bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, are not easily killed by cooking or ultraviolet rays and can survive in any part of an infected cow, posing a hazard to human health.
The best way to stay safe, Hu said, is a full ban on US beef imports.
The groups demanded that the Department of Health hold public hearings before making a decision on whether to relax or tighten restrictions on US beef imports and urged that all beef and beef-related products should be labeled with the place of production and a risk warning.
Taiwan banned US beef in 2003 when a case of mad cow disease was diagnosed in Seattle.
The ban was lifted in 2005 to allow imports of US deboned beef from cattle aged under 30 months, but the government reimposed a complete ban two months later when a second BSE case was discovered in the US.
In 2006, the government agreed to allow beef imports once again, but limited imports to boneless beef from cattle younger than 30 months of age produced by certified slaughterhouses.
Over the past three years, beef imports from the US have increased annually and the US now supplies around 32 percent of Taiwan’s beef, with the rest coming mainly from New Zealand and Australia.
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