HEALTH
No contaminated imports
Taiwan has not imported any pickled cabbage from a supply that allegedly caused a deadly outbreak of food poisoning in Hokkaido, Japan, in the first weeks of this month, health authorities said yesterday. There is no record of pickled Chinese cabbage exports to Taiwan from the food manufacturer in Sapporo that supplied the product in question, the Department of Health’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said. Japanese health authorities have reportedly recalled the pickled products manufactured by the company, the FDA said. Seven people in Japan died in the past weeks after eating pickled cabbage produced by the company, according to media reports. Five of them were found to have contracted infections caused by E. coli O157:H7 bacteria, the reports said.
DIPLOMACY
Vice president visits Belize
Vice President Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) met with Taiwanese expatriates in Belize on Sunday to show his concern for fellow countrymen who have settled in the Central American country. Wu arrived in Belize on Saturday on the third stop of an overseas trip that began on Aug. 13. He first stopped in New York on what the Ministry of Foreign Affairs described as a transit stop before visiting the Dominican Republic to attend the swearing-in of Dominican President Danilo Medina. On his first full day in Belize, one of Taiwan’s 23 diplomatic allies, the vice president visited an art store operated by a Taiwanese couple and then had high tea with representatives of Taiwanese expatriate organizations. Yesterday, Wu was scheduled to meet Governor General Sir Colville Young and hold talks with Prime Minister Dean Oliver Barrow, before visiting a farm to check on the progress of one of many Taiwan-Belize cooperation projects.
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