The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday that the latest death suspected of being related to the A(H1N1) vaccine would require a thorough investigation before any conclusions can be reached.
A 78-year-old woman surnamed Chou from Shulin City (樹林), Taipei County, died on Friday after receiving a vaccine shot on Tuesday.
“The woman had a number of chronic diseases, was constantly hospitalized and was taking various medicines. A full investigation will be necessary to confirm whether her death was related to the vaccine,” CDC spokesman Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said.
Following an inoculation program for people considered at high risk of contracting the disease, the government on Dec. 12 launched a national inoculation program for the entire population, using vaccines manufactured domestically and abroad.
The program involves 2,584 clinics and hospitals and 354 free vaccination stations set up by the Department of Health (DOH).
However, public concerns over the safety of the vaccine were triggered by reports of people feeling discomfort after receiving the shot.
On Monday, a seven-year-old boy in central Taiwan died several weeks after being immunized.
The father of the boy, a physician, said that the vaccine was to blame, but health authorities and other medical experts excluded the possibility after studying the case.
Chou Jih-haw said that only 42,000 people received the shot yesterday, the lowest turnout since the program.
DOH Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) said on Thursday that the department would create a special task force of experts in the medical and legal fields to address controversies related to the program.
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
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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
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