TOURISM
Road closure delays tours
The travel itineraries of about 150 Chinese tour groups were delayed yesterday following damage to the Suhua Highway, which leads to major scenic spots on the east coast, the Tourism Bureau said. The road closure, which was necessitated by damage to a tunnel at the highway’s 169.9km mark caused by falling rocks a day earlier, affected the travel plans of an estimated 3,600 Chinese, a bureau official said. It was the second forced closure this year for the accident-prone Suhua Highway because of weather damage. The highway is scheduled to reopen tomorrow. In the wake of an accident in 2010 when landslides triggered by Typhoon Megi killed 26 people, including 19 Chinese tourists, the highway is currently being upgraded.
HEALTHCARE
Vaccines to be tested
Government agencies involved in a major national research program signed a letter of intent on cooperation with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) yesterday to launch large-scale clinical trials of several vaccines. The two sides said that the clinical tests are to involve a quadrivalent vaccine against influenza, a lung cancer vaccine that is expected to hit the market in 2016, and the world’s first tuberculosis vaccine. GSK has more than 150 clinical trials ongoing around the world. Tests in Taiwan targeting rare diseases, vaccines, drugs for respiratory tract disease and cancer account for 13 percent of them. Progress in the quadrivalent flu vaccine has been the fastest, said Huang Li-min (黃立民), director of the department of pediatric infectious diseases at National Taiwan University Hospital. He added that the quadrivalent vaccine refers to two type-A influenza viruses — H3N2 and H1N1 — and two type-B viruses — the Victoria and Yamagata strains.
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