With the growing prevalence of dementia among the elderly population, the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee yesterday passed a motion asking the Ministry of Health and Welfare to discuss the feasibility of placing dementia-screening tests on the list of government-subsidized health checks in an effort to catch the disease early on and delay its onset.
The motion also requires dementia clinics nationwide to employ medical consultants specialized in dementia to provide the public with more detailed information about the disorder.
According to the ministry’s latest statistics, about one out of every 100 people aged 65 years old and above has dementia.
The statistics shows that the prevalence of dementia increases strongly with age, as the incidence rate for the cognitive disorder rises to between 7 percent and 13 percent in people aged 80 to 90, and climbs further to 23 percent in people in the 90-plus age bracket.
Despite the relatively high incidence, the country only has 96 specialized dementia daycare centers and 78 regional hospitals that have dementia clinics, the statistics showed.
Taiwan Alzheimer’s Disease Association secretary-general Tang Li-yu (湯麗玉) said the families of dementia patients had been forced to put up with the government’s lack of care for people with this illness.
“We have seen incidents where family members of dementia patients killed themselves by jumping off a building or committed suicide along with the patients by burning coal in a confined space. They did so because most of the government welfare programs are just pie-in-the-sky,” Tang said.
Citing examples, Tang said family members would not qualify for medical care subsidies unless they sent the patient to a daycare center for at least 20 days each month, which could cost up to NT$15,000 and few could afford.
“What they really need is for the government to give a medical care subsidy of NT$800 to NT$1,000 once a week, allowing them a brief respite from their caring roles occasionally,” Tang said.
Liu Hui-fang (劉慧芳), the wife of a man with early-onset dementia, said she had taken her husband to scores of medical divisions to undergo a variety of tests since he first started exhibiting symptoms at the age of 54, but none of them diagnosed him with dementia.
“Because of the disease, my husband has become a totally different person ... who is violent and self-abusive. I had been under so much pressure that I had thought of committing suicide more than once,” Liu said.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) also proposed renovating classrooms left unused because of the nation’s decreasing birthrate into daycare centers for dementia patients to make up for the serious lack of such institutions.
Since the proposal is related to regulations governing the use of public school properties and other complicated matters, it has been referred to cross-party negotiations.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the