The Bureau of Health Promotion’s quit smoking competition attracted more than 31,000 pairs this year and ended yesterday with a NT$300,000 cash prize being given to the winner.
The competition began on March 25 and required each team, which consisted of a non-smoker witness and a smoker contestant, to quit smoking for four weeks.
The first and second prize winners were randomly selected from the participants late last month. Visits and urine tests were conducted under the scrutiny of lawyers, to make sure the contestants had quit smoking.
The first prize this year was given to a 51-year-old man surnamed Lee (李), who lives in New Taipei City (新北市).
Lee said he had smoked for 34 years and used to smoke about a pack of cigarettes a day. He said that although he had tried to quit before, his job as a security guard working midnight shifts had made him unable to conquer his addiction.
“I promised my daughter that I would quit smoking, but the first week of quitting was really painful,” Lee said. “Fortunately, there was a change in my work routine at the time, which allowed my daily schedule to become more normal. I also drank a lot of water and ate more fruit and vegetables to help me get through the uncomfortable feeling during the first phase of quitting.”
According to a survey conducted by the bureau last year, the smoking rate among men was 33.5 percent, and more than 40 percent among young men aged between 26 and 45. The bureau added that the smoking rate among young people with education below junior-high school level was also very high: 73.5 percent in men and 24.7 percent in women.
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