A man died after being attacked by hornets on Wednesday in the first reported fatality from hornet stings this year, prompting authorities to warn the public to take precautions when in the mountains or in forested areas.
The incident was the latest in a spate of hornet attacks over the past few months in mountainous regions throughout the nation, which resulted in serious injuries to scores of people who had to be admitted to hospitals for treatment.
The victim, surnamed Wu (吳), was doing landscaping at Tamkang University’s Lanyang Campus in Yilan County’s Jiaosi Township (礁溪) with four other workers when he was attacked.
A fellow worker, surnamed Yu (游), said all five of the landscaping crew wore long-sleeved protective clothing, including head nets, while they trimmed grass and cleaned up walkways on the campus, which is on the slope of Linmei Mountain (林美山).
“We started work at 1pm. Suddenly a swarm of several hundred hornets appeared and attacked us. Then we saw Wu putting a hand to his head, shouting that he had been stung and it was very painful,” Yu said.
“At the time, Wu appeared to be fine. However, within two minutes he fell down and lost consciousness, with white foam trickling from his mouth,” he added.
The crew called “119” for help, but when an ambulance arrived to take Wu to hospital, he had no pulse and was not breathing. He was pronounced dead after efforts to resuscitate him failed.
Yu said that one of the crew may have inadvertently disturbed the hornets’ nest. He said the swarm that attacked them were “black-tailed tiger-head hornets,” as they are called in Taiwan.
It was learned later that Wu, 47, was stung by hornets three months ago, which likely had contributed to his death.
“It seems that Wu died from anaphylactic shock, which is a severe allergic reaction by the body,” said Liu Shih-wei (劉士偉), resident doctor at the emergency ward of the National Yang-Ming University Hospital. “When he was stung by hornets the first time, his body produced antibodies in reaction to the venom. When he was attacked by hornets on Wednesday, the existing antibodies in his system produced a serious allergic reaction, he went into shock and passed away.”
Local firefighter units were dispatched to the site to investigate. They reported seeing a number of black-tailed tiger head hornets flying about in the area, but they could not find the nest. University officials promised that warning signs would be posted in the area to alert people to the presence of the deadly hornets.
Health authorities are warning people to stay away from hornets’ nests, and to wear long trousers and shirts with long sleeves when in forested and mountainous areas.
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