Following two recent cases involving confused elderly people, police are urging the public to be on the lookout for the onset of dementia in family members.
The Chinese-language United Daily News reported that a 93-year-old Yunlin County farmer surnamed Tu (涂) on Monday went to the local police station in Gukeng Township (古坑) and informed Kao Hai-fu (高海富), the officer on duty, that an old woman was standing in front of his home and she seemed to be lost.
Kao accompanied the man back home and found the woman, who could not remember her name, where she lived, telephone number or other details. All she could remember was that her family name was Tu (涂).
The farmer reacted angrily.
“You are talking nonsense. Tu is my family name. You cannot just use my name like that,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.
Kao then took the couple to nearby residents to see if anyone could identify the woman.
A neighbor told the officer that the couple were husband and wife. Kao thought the neighbor was joking, but after further questioning he said he realized the neighbor was right and the couple were probably both suffering from dementia.
He took them home and after the couple relaxed for a while, they were able to recognize one another, the newspaper said.
Kao later got in touch with their son, who lives nearby, and told him to pay closer attention to his parents.
In another case in Chiayi this week, two police officers found a 94-year-old man confused and sitting on a traffic island in a busy intersection, the newspaper reported.
Sinnan Precinct officers Tseng Wei-kuo (曾維國) and Lin Geng-liang (林耿良) were on patrol when they came upon the nonagenarian surnamed Wang (王) on Wufong S Road, with cars and motorcycles whizzing past.
The man was unable to tell the officers where he came from, so they took him back to their station, the paper said.
When they reached the station, they found an elderly woman had called to report that her husband had gone out to buy lunch about noontime and had not returned, the paper said.
Her description of her husband matched the man Tseng and Lin had found, so they returned him to his home and a very relieved wife, it said.
The newspaper report quoted Fang Chen-wen (方楨文), a neurologist at the Yunlin branch of National Taiwan University Hospital, as saying that the symptoms of people with dementia tend to worsen when weather conditions fluctuate or when there are changes in their living environment.
“However, when the weather stabilizes, the dementia symptoms tend to stabilize. It was likely the cold air mass that brought lower temperatures in the past few days that led to an increase in elderly people manifesting symptoms of dementia,” Fang said.
The physician called on family members to pay close attention to their elderly relatives and live with them if possible.
“It is a good idea to have them wear identification tags on a bracelet or necklace that provides their name, address and telephone numbers. This will help identify them if they get lost,” he said.
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