The Council of Agriculture’s planned testing for rabies serves no purpose, a report released by civic group Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan (EAST) and US nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said yesterday.
The first case of rabies found on a wild Formosan ferret-badger was confirmed in July last year. It had previously been thought rabies had been eradicated in Taiwan by 1959.
In August last year specialists from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discussed with government agencies measures for tackling the outbreak.
Photo: CNA
EAST executive director Chu Tseng-hung (朱增宏) said that while the conclusion of the meetings was that animal testing was unnecessary, the council’s Animal Health Research Institute announced that animal testing — using 190 mice, 36 ferret-badgers and 14 beagles — was needed and had been recommended by foreign specialists.
Chu said the agency equivocated on the reason for live testing, but finally stated it was to test the effectiveness of existing pet vaccines, develop new vaccines and understand the pathogenesis of rabies-infected dogs.
“Article 15 of the Animal Protection Act (動物保護法) stipulates that when it is unavoidable to use live animals for scientific application, the number of tests should be kept to a minimum and conducted with the least pain or harm. Our report proves that the experiment is unnecessary” Chu added.
Committee medical research specialist Sarah Cavanaugh said the council believes animal testing is needed because Taiwanese rabies is unique, but the protein sequences of viruses found in Taiwan and China only differ by 10 percent.
All types of rabies belong to one of three lyssavirus phylogroups and current vaccines can protect against all viruses in this phylogroup, Cavanaugh said.
“So the 10 percent difference between the Chinese and Taiwanese rabies is not particularly large,” she said, adding that current rabies vaccines should be effective against Taiwanese rabies.
Cavanaugh said a technique accepted worldwide — fluorescent antibody virus neutralization testing — draws blood from vaccinated dogs to collect serum and mixes the serum with rabies-infected cells to test its effectiveness, a procedure that does not require killing or harming the animals.
In addition, she said there have been a variety of studies in other countries on the pathogenesis of rabies in infected animals, so the Council of Agriculture experiment is redundant.
Yeh Lih-seng (葉力森), a professor of veterinary medicine at National Taiwan University, said an in-depth epidemiologic survey on wild animals is more necessary for Taiwan.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) said that since July last year, there were 45 cases (39 dogs and six cats) of animals reported to have been bitten by rabies-infected ferret-badgers and 39 of them were confirmed to have been infected by rabies.
During the time that these 45 animals were kept captive for observation, no data were collected for further testing, which is a flaw that must be addressed, Hsiao said.
She added that the council, which is in charge of the nation’s animal protection, does not value life, and questioned how it could monitor animal testing or cruelty perpetrated by others.
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
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
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