The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on Sunday reported the first imported case of human rabies of the year, urging the public to take preventive measures before traveling to rabies-affected areas.
A 31-year-old Filipino migrant worker started to experience backaches and discomfort on May 4, nearly a month after arriving in Taiwan on April 7 from the Philippines. The worker later developed nausea, loss of appetite, sore throat, fever, abnormal gait and delirium, the CDC said.
The patient has been hospitalized in a quarantine ward because rabies is a category 1 notifiable communicable disease. His condition is deteriorating rapidly and he is now suffering from multiple organ failure, the centers reported.
“The hospital physician that first treated the patient became alarmed after noticing two bite marks on his fingers,” CDC physician Philip Yi-chun Lo (羅一鈞) said.
Through a polymerase chain reaction saliva test, the centers confirmed that the man was infected with rabies and identified the particular strain of the virus as corresponding to the one found in the Philippines.
The agency contacted the patient’s family in the Philippines and found that he had been bitten by a dog on March 10, but had not sought medical attention.
“The incubation period of the rabies virus can last from 30 days up to 50 days,” Lo said.
Other than the symptoms already described, other possible symptoms of the virus include vomiting, difficulty breathing and a prickling sensation in the area of the bite, the CDC said. Within days of being infected, symptoms of anxiety, agitation, difficulty swallowing and hydrophobia may also manifest, it added.
Rabies is a kind of acute encephalomyelitis and survival is rare once the clinical signs of the disease appear, the agency said. The disease has an almost 100 percent fatality rate.
Taiwan reported two rabies cases imported from China in 2011 and last year, the centers said. Taiwan is one of the few rabies-free countries in the world, with no non-imported human rabies cases recorded since 1959 and no animal cases since January 1961, it added.
The CDC advised those planning to travel to rabies-affected areas to visit travel clinics one month prior to their trip to receive three doses of the pre-exposure rabies vaccine.
If bitten by an animal in a rabies-affected area, one should rinse the wound under running water for 15 minutes before seeking emergency medical help and receiving five dosages of post-exposure vaccinations.
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