Experiments that will infect healthy dogs with the rabies virus will continue as planned, the Council of Agriculture said, dismissing calls of protest from animal activists and Hollywood stars.
US entertainment news Web site Ecorazzi reported on Monday that celebrities, including actors Alec Baldwin and Maggie Q, have petitioned Council Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基), urging Taiwan to focus on vaccinating dogs and cats to prevent transmission of the deadly disease, rather than infecting healthy animals to learn more about it.
Council Deputy Minister Wang Cheng-teng (王政騰) said on Tuesday that no changes have been made to plans to conduct the animal tests.
The experiments will start with healthy mice and Formosan ferret-badgers before testing on dogs, as part of an effort to see how rabies is transmitted between species, he added.
To date, rabies in Taiwan has been found almost exclusively in ferret-badgers, with the sole exception of one Asian house shrew, prompting speculation that this particular strain of the virus cannot be passed on to other species.
In his letter, Baldwin urged the council to call off the experiments, “since we already know that all [rabies] variants can infect any warm-blooded animals.”
“I have two dogs myself and want them to be safe from the threat of rabies, so I understand your concern about the recent rabies outbreak in Taiwan, your desire to protect the city’s [sic] animals and humans,” the Emmy Award-winning actor wrote, according to media reports. “But infecting beagle puppies with this new strain of rabies isn’t the answer.”
Actress and animal rights campaigner Maggie Q wrote her own letter of protest to Chen last month, and called the tests “a step backward.”
The US Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has also campaigned against what it calls a “cruel experiment.”
“It sounds like a scene from a horror movie,” committee president Neal Barnard wrote in the organization’s petition on Change.org that has gathered more than 46,000 signatures.
The council responded to similar criticisms and protests last month by saying it would strictly follow laboratory and ethical standards.
Chen said at the time that the experiments would only go ahead with approval from a panel composed of animal rights activists and experts, along with members of the council’s Animal Health Research Institute.
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