A medical specialist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington-based non-profit organization, yesterday issued an open letter to Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) urging the Taiwanese government to avoid animal experiments by infecting unvaccinated animals with the rabies virus.
Since the Council of Agriculture (COA) announced its plan to conduct animal experiments to test the rabies virus found in wild animals in Taiwan in August, local animal rights groups, activists and experts have expressed their opposition to the plan.
Foreign celebrities, including actors Maggie Q and Alec Baldwin, have also petitioned Council of Agriculture Minister Chen Bao-ji (陳保基), saying Taiwan should not infect healthy beagles to learn about the virus, but focus on the more effective prevention measure of vaccinating cats and dogs.
The PCRM, which launched an Internet petition against the plan, has gathered more than 46,000 signatures.
Sarah Cavanaugh, a medical research specialist of the committee, issued an open letter to Jiang yesterday.
“We [the PCRM] remain concerned about the continued insistence by the COA that infection experiments with mice, ferret-badgers, and beagle puppies are necessary for vaccine development and outbreak control,” she wrote. “The use of dogs in rabies virus research is both unnecessary and unethical.”
Cavanaugh said experts in the field of rabies biology have clearly refuted the council’s plan and suggest that “vaccine efficacy in canine populations, which is essential to confirm in a timely manner, can be determined through a simple blood draw from previously vaccinated dogs, followed by in vitro virus neutralization assays.”
Claiming that experimenting on dogs would be a waste of valuable time, money and animal lives without offering any substantial benefit to public health, she said: “The most effective strategy for both short- and long-term prevention and control of rabies infection is widespread vaccination of wild and domesticated animals.”
The committee said it hoped the Taiwanese government would reconsider plans to infect unvaccinated animals with the virus.
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
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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