■ EARTHQUAKES
Quake causes train stoppage
An earthquake measuring 4.6 on the Richter scale struck central and southern Taiwan at 11:36am yesterday, but no immediate damage was reported. The Central Weather Bureau said the epicenter of the earthquake was located 16km south of Chiayi City at a depth of 11km. Although the quake had a magnitude of only 1 in Kaohsiung City, the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp temporarily suspended service from Kaohsiung to Taichung City as a precautionary measure. The company canceled two trains after the quake struck and stopped selling tickets for about 80 minutes. Ticket windows resumed normal operations at 12:55pm. The quake had an intensity of 2 in Chiayi City and Tainan City. An earthquake measuring 6.4 struck Chiayi on the same day 10 years ago, with seven houses destroyed at that time.
■ MEDICINE
Doctor investigated
A doctor at a clinic in Sanchong (三重), Taipei County, came under investigation by prosecutors yesterday after local health authorities accused him of dereliction of duty in a fatal case of influenza A(H1N1) involving a 39-year-old woman. Relatives of the woman accused the attending doctor, surnamed Tan (譚), of failing to administer proper treatment after she tested positive for A(H1N1) at the clinic on Oct. 13. She was diagnosed two days after she developed a fever and a cough, but instead of being treated with anti-viral medication, she was given four bags of intravenous fluid on Tan旧 orders. The doctor said the clinic had not been supplied with the anti-viral drug Tamiflu, Yang said. The woman was transferred to an intensive care unit last Friday after it was confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control that she had contracted A(H1N1). She died on Tuesday.
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
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
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