The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday announced this year’s first confirmed case of psittacosis (parrot fever) in the nation.
The patient is a 44-year-old man living in the central part of the country. He began to display symptoms of headache, fever, chills, body sores and coughing on Jan. 1, the centers said. The hospital reported the case to the centers on Jan. 11, and multiple tests of the man’s blood samples confirmed on Friday that he had been suffering from parrot fever.
The man has returned home after treatment and is recovering well, the centers said.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
Health officials said the man’s pet bird was a probable source of the infection.
Parrot fever is caused by the Chlamydophila psittaci bacterium, which is carried by many species of birds, including parrots, macaws, small cockatoos, ducks and pigeons.
The incubation period of parrot fever ranges from five to 28 days, during which a person can display symptoms such as headache, fever, chills, muscle pains and coughing. The death rate for parrot fever is less than 1 percent, the centers said.
While the disease can be passed from human to human, such transmission is very rare. It is usually spread by exposure to infected birds at home, pet stores, pigeon stalls and other locations where birds are kept or displayed, health officials said. Dry excrement is the principal cause of infection.
The last confirmed parrot fever case in Taiwan was in 2008, and the victim then also had a history of contact with birds.
Psittacosis was first reported in Europe in 1879.
However, an outbreak in the US in 1929 was largely responsible for the creation of the US National Institutes of Health. From 2002 until 2009, a total of 66 cases of parrot fever were reported in the US.
Health authorities said that even birds that appear to be healthy can be carriers of the bacterium and can infect humans.
Those who take care of birds should wear facemasks and gloves when cleaning out birdcages, and should wash their hands thoroughly after touching birds.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY STAFF WRITER
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