The Taipei City Government will set up eight “quit smoking” booths around the city designed to attract smokers, while providing them with information to help them give up the habit.
The city’s Department of Health said the plan is aimed at providing outdoor smoking areas for smokers and creating more opportunities for smokers to access information and channels to quit smoking.
Yu Li-hui (游麗惠), a division chief at the department, said the department would set up the booths on the east side of Taipei Railway Station and in outdoor areas at six branches of the Taipei City Hospital next year.
Each of the booths can accommodate three to seven people and will be equipped with a ventilation system to encourage smokers to smoke inside the booths, she said.
“We will post information inside the booths, using a ‘soft power’ approach to persuade smokers to quit. We will make the booths comfortable so that smokers don’t feel they are being discriminated against,” she said.
Yu dismissed concerns that the booths would violate the Tobacco Hazards Prevention and Control Act (菸害防治法), as they will be set up in outdoor areas.
The Act bans smoking at indoor facilities designed for more than three people, such as government offices, hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, Internet cafes and karaoke bars.
Many people have complained about second-hand smoke since the Act came into force in January, as the number of people who gather outside office buildings and on the sidewalk has increased, Yu said.
The city government said that it would add more booths if the plan is successful, she 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