A worker from the Philippines who contracted rabies in his home country died in a hospital in Pingtung County yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said.
CDC Deputy Director-General Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said that the centers were notified of the death earlier in the day by the Pingtung hospital, which had been treating the 31-year-old worker in an intensive care ward.
The worker was bitten by a dog in the Philippines on March 10 before arriving in Taiwan on April 7 to take a factory job, the CDC said.
He went to see a doctor on May 4 after he started to feel ill and his health deteriorated quickly. Tests confirmed he was infected with the rabies virus on May 11.
The man’s body has been cremated as required by law, since rabies is a class-one notifiable disease and is almost 100 percent fatal, Chou said.
The case was this year’s first imported incident of rabies in Taiwan, which has reported no domestic human cases since 1959 and no domestic animal cases since 1961.
The nation reported only one imported rabies case last year and the most recent one before that was in 2002.
Patients in both of the previous cases had contracted the disease in China, the CDC’s Web site 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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