Minister of Education Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) yesterday expressed confidence in the government’s policy to vaccinate schoolchildren against the A(H1N1) influenza despite concerns about the safety of the vaccine.
During a joint meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee and Education and Culture Committee, Wu said the Ministry of Education (MOE) would still encourage students to get vaccinated but would respect the decisions of their parents.
Wu said statistics showed that outbreaks of H1N1 on campuses had been controlled after students in elementary and junior high schools received the injections.
Wu was responding to legislators’ concerns after reports of people feeling discomfort or even dying after receiving the vaccinations.
On Dec. 12, he government started a program aimed at inoculating the nation’s entire population.
The program involves 2,584 clinics and hospitals and 354 free vaccination stations set up by the Department of Health (DOH).
Meanwhile, National Cheng Kung University president Michael Lai (賴明詔), a renowned coronavirus researcher, urged staff and students of the university to have the vaccine, saying the threat of illness was far more serious than possible side effects of the vaccine.
At a separate setting, Minister of Health Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) said new members on a Centers for Disease Control committee assembled to investigate vaccine-related cases would work impartially. The term for the 17 current members expires today. Yaung said new members would work in an environment free of political interference.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JIMMY CHUANG
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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