Swine flu shots became available yesterday for babies aged between six months and a year, and a health official said babies can be vaccinated for both A(H1N1) and seasonal flu at the same time.
Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Lin Ting (林頂) said the number of babies eligible for the vaccinations has been estimated at between 100,000 and 150,000, and the vaccinations are available at 548 locations nationwide, such as local county or city health departments and district health centers.
For the two-dose A(H1N1) vaccination, babies need to receive the shots a month apart, he said.
PHOTO: CNA
Babies allergic to eggs should not receive the shots as they could trigger an allergic reaction.
People affected by Typhoon Morakot and health care personnel have been receiving the A(H1N1) shots since the beginning of this month after the government placed them at the top of the priority list.
Next on the list after the babies under a year old are pre-school children, seriously ill patients and elementary school students, who are scheduled to receive the shots starting next Monday.
Others on the priority list are junior and senior high school students, people in the 19 to 24 age bracket and those over 25 at high risk of cardiopulmonary disease, healthy people in the 25 to 49 age bracket, and people between 50 and 64 years of age, in that order.
In related news, Hsu Tien-lai (??, director-general of the Council of Agriculture’s Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine, said yesterday that pigs on a farm in Taitung that were diagnosed with the A(H1N1) influenza virus late last month are recovering without showing new traces of the virus.
The infection was discovered among a herd of 160 pigs raised on the farm in Guanshan Township (關山) after the animals came down with coughs, runny noses and diarrhea at the end of last month.
Hsu said that in a second round of specimen collections and sophisticated tests conducted by the Centers for Disease Control on Thursday, all the affected pigs were found to be free of the virus.
A third round of tests is scheduled to be conducted tomorrow, Hsu said, adding that if the affected pigs test negative, restrictions on their movement will be lifted.
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