Taipei health officials yesterday said another peak was expected in the enterovirus season later this year with the end of summer vacation and children returning to school.
The city’s Department of Health cited figures compiled by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) showing that 6.78 of every 1,000 emergency cases nationwide in the week of July 24 through July 30 reported enterovirus symptoms.
The department said the number rose to 7.48 in the city and that the situation was expected to get more serious once school starts because children will have more frequent contact with one another, increasing the chances of infection.
There was an earlier peak on July 25, when CDC official Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥) said more patients than usual had been found to exhibit enterovirus symptoms.
Taipei health official Lin Kuo-ning (林國甯) said that as of the end of that week, 2,461 cases of enterovirus had been reported this year in the nation’s capital.
Lin said 162 schools or other educational institutes in the city had been forced to temporarily suspend classes because the number of infected students in each class exceeded the allowable limit.
Meanwhile, the department said schools that discover students with symptoms of the disease should report the cases to health officials within 48 hours.
As of yesterday, the CDC had confirmed three cases of severe enterovirus this year, one of which was fatal. All three had enterovirus 71, the most virulent strain of the disease.
Most cases so far have been the coxsackievirus, a less serious type of enterovirus, the CDC 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
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
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