■ TRANSPORT
One dead in MRT fall
Operations on Taipei City’s MRT Red and Blue lines were temporarily suspended yesterday after two passengers fell from different platforms at Mingde and Ximen stations. The Taipei Rapid Transit Corp said that a male passenger fell from the platform at Mingde Station at 5:40pm, followed by a similar incident in which a female passenger fell from the platform at Ximen Station at 5:46pm. The passenger at Mingde Station was rushed to Taipei Veteran’s General Hospital where he later died, while the passenger at Ximen Station was sent to Taipei Hoping Hospital for treatment. The company said police were investigating whether the two passengers tried to commit suicide or fell from the platforms accidentally. The two lines resumed full operation at 6:15pm, the firm said.
■ HEALTH
Pap tests well received
An initiative launched on Mother’s Day this year to encourage low-income women to have pap smears has proved successful, the Bureau of Health Promotion said on Monday. As of Aug. 31, 5,978 women over the age of 30 who had not had a pap smear in at least three years had been tested under the program, the bureau said in a statement. Of the total number of women tested, 2,095 had not had a pap smear in 10 years, while 1,612 had not been screened in 15 years, the bureau said. Sixty-seven of the women had positive pap smears, which detect premalignant or malignant cells in the cervix. The 1.12 percent detection rate was higher than the 0.6 percent recorded in the national pap smear campaign last year, the bureau said. Encouraged by the results of the campaign, the bureau said it had decided to extend the closing date from Sept. 30 to Oct. 31.
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
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,
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