HEALTH
CDC warns against dengue
People should be on high alert against dengue fever, as the number of reported cases of the tropical disease have risen compared with the same time last year, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The latest case involves a 55-year-old man in Greater Tainan, who was confirmed to be infected with the mosquito-borne illness after developing a fever and headache on July 19 and is now receiving treatment, the agency said. There have been 378 confirmed cases of dengue fever in the nation so far this year, compared with about 200 in the same period last year, the CDC said, citing data valid as of Friday. It said that among the 378 cases, 276 were contracted locally, while 102 were imported. The CDC urged people to take preventive measures such as draining water containers and taking precautions against mosquito bites.
ECONOMY
ECFA committee to meet
A negotiation platform established under the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) is to hold its sixth biannual meeting in Beijing on Tuesday next week to discuss the pact’s implementation so far. The Cross-strait Economic Cooperation Committee was set up in January 2011 to handle follow-up negotiations on ECFA processes. It meets every six months, with the two sides taking turns to host. The first meeting was in Taoyuan in February 2011. The Straits Exchange Foundation and China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits each released a statement yesterday to announce the upcoming meeting. The foundation said the two sides are to review ECFA’s progress; trade in merchandise and services; dispute settlement; industrial and customs cooperation; and setting up reciprocal representative offices on either side.
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