HEALTH
Infection hits hospital
A recent infection among the staff of a ward at the Taipei Veterans General Hospital did not affect any patients undergoing treatment, but the source of the infection remains unclear, hospital officials said yesterday. According to Taipei City’s Department of Health, which investigated the incident on Tuesday, 15 medical personnel showed symptoms of coughing and pneumonia caused by the Mycoplasmataceae bacteria. Chen Tien-hsiung (陳天雄), a vice superintendent at the hospital, said that staff began showing symptoms of respiratory illness at the end of last month, with one of them experiencing pulmonary infiltrates. All 15 people infected tested negative for influenza and have since been recovering, Chen said. The 12 patients on the ward were not infected and were moved to other wards, Chen said.
TOURISM
Japan-Taiwan tourism rises
The number of bilateral visits made by tourists from Taiwan and Japan is expected to reach more than 3 million this year as a result of closer relations and the signing of the open-skies agreement last November, said Su Qi-cheng (蘇啟誠), deputy secretary-general of the Association of East Asian Relations under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Taiwan recorded more than 714,570 visits by Japanese travelers in the first half of the year, up 21.46 percent compared with the same period last year, he said. During the same timescale more than 731,370 Taiwanese traveled to Japan, representing an increase of 49.58 percent, Su said. Usually more Taiwanese visit Japan than vice versa, but since last year’s earthquake numbers have fallen. Taiwan received 1.29 million visitors from Japan and 1.14 million visits were made by Taiwanese to Japan in 2010.
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