An eight-year-old Vietnamese girl thanked her doctors in Mandarin on Tuesday at a press conference in Hanoi to share the story of surgery to repair her deformed leg.
With her left leg still in braces, Nguyen Thi Loan got out of her wheelchair with the help of her mother and placed both feet lightly on the ground.
Such a scene was unimaginable six months ago for the then-bedridden child, who was born with a massive tumor on her leg, which grew to 15kg, making her left leg six times the size of the right.
The deformity rendered her incapable of standing and threatened her life. Making matters worse was another tumor that appeared on her anus, causing her intense pain.
Doctors in Ho Chi Minh City told the child’s parents that they were incapable of performing surgery to correct the condition.
At the press conference, Nguyen was accompanied by Taiwanese Representative to Vietnam Huang Chih-peng (黃志鵬) and her attending physician, Chen Hung-chi (陳宏基), head of the Taichung-based China Medical University Hospital Department of International Medicine.
With the assistance of Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council and staff of the hospital, Nguyen came to Taiwan six months ago to receive corrective surgery.
Chen said the brave girl underwent six major operations over six months, including reconstruction of her leg, massive skin grafts and the removal of her rectum and spleen.
The little girl said her dream was to “ride a bicycle and chase the wind with other children,” which is now not such a distant dream thanks to Taiwanese doctors.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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