The Department of Health (DOH) said Minister Chiu Wen-ta (邱文達) will be recognized by the American Public Health Association (APHA) today for his efforts to establish one of the largest databases of brain injuries and for a law enacted that requires motorcyclists to wear helmets.
The APHA will award Chiu with the David P Rall Award for Advocacy in Public Health, the DOH said, adding that Chiu will be the first non-US citizen to receive the award.
Chiu is being recognized for his more than 30 years of research on the prevention and treatment of brain injuries, the establishment of one of the largest such databases with over 180,000 cases and for contributing to the enactment of a regulation that stipulates that all motorcyclists must wear helmets, it said, adding that the enactment of the regulation had prevented head injuries and saved more than 3,000 lives.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
The research paper, titled the “Effect of the Taiwan Motorcycle Helmet Use Law on Head Injuries,” was published by the American Journal of Public Health in 2000 and its follow-up report on the implementation of a motorcycle helmet law in Taiwan and traffic deaths over an 18-year period was published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association last year, it added.
The DOH said APHA is an organization with tens of thousands of members across the world, and at its 140th annual meeting and exposition, US President Barack Obama will also be awarded the APHA Presidential Citation.
Chiu will also make a speech entitled “Overview of Taiwan’s Pressing Health Problems,” to the Taiwan-America Public Health Scholar Network, before the Public Health Awards reception and ceremony.
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:
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