HEALTH
Four EV71 cases detected
The Department of Health yesterday confirmed four new severe cases of enterovirus 71 (EV71) infections, bringing the total number of reported cases to 34 this year. The four are a two-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy in northern Taiwan, a two-year-old boy in central Taiwan and a nine-month-old boy in the south. The department said the four children developed symptoms of fever, rashes, oral ulcers and a series of complications from late last month. The three boys had fully recovered, but the girl remains hospitalized. The number of people infected with enterovirus has increased significantly in the past two weeks, Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said. The department has formed a task force to deal with the disease during the peak season, and asked kindergartens and schools to provide clean environments, report cases and suspend classes to reduce outbreaks and the risk of infection among children.
TOURISM
More visitors to Philippines
Taiwan was the fifth-largest source of foreign tourists to the Philippines in the first quarter, Philippine Tourism Secretary Ramon Jimenez said on Monday. The number of tourist visits from Taiwan to the Philippines in the first three months of the year rose 37 percent from a year earlier to 57,745, Jimenez said, outpacing the 16 percent growth in the country’s total tourist arrivals. Jimenez said most of the Taiwanese tourists headed directly to Boracay, an island south of Manila with a fine white sand beach. The Philippines and Taiwan are in talks to give Taiwanese visa-free treatment, which will surely encourage more Taiwanese to visit the Southeast Asian country, Representative to the Philippines Raymond Wang (王樂生) 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