A five-month-old Nauruan boy has been given a new lease of life by doctors at Taichung Veterans General Hospital, who succeeded in correcting a congenital spinal deformity and other problems after a month of surgeries.
The boy, identified only as Aremwa, was born with a condition known as spina bifida, a developmental spinal disorder.
He also had a 10cm congenital cyst in his spinal cord, neurosurgeon Chiang Ming-zer (江明哲) said on Thursday.
The cyst would have caused a severe infection if it had ruptured, Chiang said.
In addition, the infant was suffering from congenital hydrocephalus, an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid on the brain, and was not able to sleep on his back because of pain, the doctor said.
After a month of successful surgeries, Aremwa is recovering well and will return to his South Pacific home soon, Chiang said, adding that the infant’s post-operative care will be handled by a team of doctors from the Taichung hospital, stationed in Nauru, a diplomatic ally of Taiwan.
According to Chiang, the baby’s condition was discovered before he was born, and the spinal deformity was evident at birth, but the hospitals in Nauru lacked the MRI equipment that would have allowed for a precise diagnosis.
Aremwa and his mother came to Taiwan last month under the terms of a 2011 memorandum of understanding between the Taichung hospital and Nauru’s Ministry of Health.
Nauru is to pay most of the medical costs, the hospital said.
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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