Taipei City Councilor Chuang Jui-hsiung (莊瑞雄) said yesterday that because of a delayed response by the Taipei City Government, people who fished in one of the city’s creeks may have eaten fish that were contaminated with pesticides.
“Earlier this month, thousands of fish went belly-up in the Shuangxi (雙溪), but nobody knew why … After investigations, the city’s Department of Health found that it was because large amounts of extremely toxic pesticides had washed into the river,” Chuang said.
Chuang lambasted the city government for not immediately warning people that the water in a popular fishing spot had been contaminated.
On July 5, about 300kg of dead fish were found floating in the Shilin District creek.
“On July 4, there was a fire at a Shuangxi Park administration warehouse, which is located at the riverbank. The warehouse contained a three-to-six-month supply of pesticides,” he said.
Chuang said that when the fire occurred, the park administration failed to inform firefighters of the content of the warehouse. As a result, a lot of the substances washed into the river when they were putting the blaze out.
“My voters came and told me that the river smelled very foul, but they didn’t know what caused the smell,” he said.
In response, deputy director of the Shuangxi Park Administration Hsu Tien-chou (?w) said that toxin levels in the pesticides would have been reduced by the fire.
However, city Department of Health specialist Hu Shu-fang (胡淑芳) said that before the reason for the fish deaths was confirmed, people were advised against eating fish caught from the river.
Liao Chia-lung (廖家龍), section chief of the city’s Water Conservation Agency, said the city would set up announcement boards along the riverbank to inform park visitors of the incident.
“We will tell fishers that while it is alright to fish, the fish are not suitable for consumption,” Liao 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
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