New Department of Health (DOH) Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) said yesterday that the department would announce by next Saturday regulations on the closing of schools in the event of an outbreak of influenza A(H1N1).
The DOH and the Ministry of Education (MOE) have reached a consensus on the school closure issue and decided to make a joint announcement more than two weeks before schools open on Sept. 1, he said.
The DOH said last week that it could propose a nationwide school shutdown in the event of a serious influenza A(H1N1) outbreak when schools reopen after the summer break.
Yaung said Taiwan would adopt measures that are stricter than those in the US.
“Our criteria will be more restrictive than those in the United States, where health authorities suggest that affected students stay home but schools need not close in the event of an A(H1N1) outbreak,” Yaung said.
The DOH would still ask affected students to stay home if they were infected, officials said.
Taking cues from other countries’ experience, Centers for Disease Control Director-General Kuo Hsu-sung (郭旭崧) said the centers had drawn up plans to contain the spread of the disease, particularly after local schools reopen in the fall.
“Campus flu infections are most likely to trigger community cluster infections, so we may advise the Ministry of Education to close all schools to contain a further spread of the virus,” Kuo said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,