The case of an eight-year-old girl who allegedly died of malnutrition is being investigated, the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday.
Prosecutors’ office spokesman Huang Mou-hsin (黃謀信) said the girl’s mother sent her daughter to a hospital in Taipei late last month for emergency treatment.
The daughter was rushed to Mackay Memorial Hospital on April 20 without a heartbeat or other signs of life, the hospital said, adding that staff suspected that the girl, who was significantly smaller than children of her age — only 90cm tall and weighing 8kg — had been starved to death.
The hospital reported the case to police.
Huang said prosecutors are probing whether the mother had a part to play in the child’s death.
The mother was quoted by the prosecutors as denying that her daughter went hungry for long periods, but added that she did not make her daughter eat three meals a day.
According to growth charts released by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the average weight of eight-year-old girls is 25kg with an average height of 1.25m.
The mother said the girl was born prematurely and suffered from slow development.
Medical records show the girl had not visited a doctor since she took several vaccines before turning three, the prosecutors said, adding that the girl was 6kg at two years old, meaning she gained just two kilograms in five years.
Yesterday, the Taipei City Government’s Department of Education said that it would punish personnel responsible after the girl was supposed to have enrolled at school, but failed to do so.
The child was to enroll at Hulu Elementary School in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林) in 2012, but her parents did not send her there.
The school has been criticized for failing to report the situation to the authorities.
Early intervention could probably have prevented the tragedy, Department of Education chief secretary Chen Shun-ho (陳順和) said.
School principal Chi Lu-jen (齊祿禎) said all responsible personnel, including herself, are to be punished.
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
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
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,