About two-thirds of people with diabetes, the fifth-biggest cause of death, have failed to maintain good blood glucose control, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday.
Last year, 9,281 people died of diabetes, it said.
With a survey in 2007 showing that 8 percent of the population aged 20 or over had hyperglycemia, the administration said that implies there are now an estimated 1.5 million people aged 20 or above with high blood sugar levels.
The authority said that while a recent survey showed that there has been an improvement in diabetes control, as many as 65 percent of people fail to maintain healthy blood sugar levels.
It said research shows that one in four diabetics risk amputation due to foot ulcers.
A local study also showed that the prevalence rates of diabetic foot ulcers and of subsequent amputations with diabetes were 1.3 percent and 0.7 percent respectively, the agency said.
The amputation risk is 9.2 times higher in male diabetics and 11.6 times higher in female diabetics, compared with those without the disease, the survey showed.
HPA Director-General Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞) said that diabetes is a chronic metabolic disease that can, if not well controlled, damage blood vessels and nerves, leading to stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, retinal detachment, lower limb gangrene or amputation.
“Patients with nerve damage might initially feel unwell, and by the time they visit a hospital because of a foot injury, their condition may already be pretty serious,” Taichung Veterans General Hospital director of Endocrinology and Metabolism Lin Shih-yi (林時逸) said. “Sometimes [the affected part] turns black and has to be amputated.”
Chiou said that the best strategy to protect diabetics from amputation is “to have a foot examination once a year, take good care of their feet, quit smoking, and maintain good control of their blood sugar, blood pressure and blood lipids.”
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods