With young couples gearing up for Chinese Lovers’ Day tomorrow, doctors are urging sexually active people to be screened for syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that often has no noticeable symptoms.
Citing the latest statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control, Kuo Yi-hung (郭奕宏), a doctor at the pharmacy department of Taipei City Hospital’s Kunming Branch, said that as of July 20, there had been 3,663 confirmed cases of syphilis in the nation, most of which involved sexually active men and women aged between 15 and 59.
“Syphilis is listed as a category 3 notifiable communicable disease and a large proportion of infected patients in the country are in the primary or secondary stages of infection, which are highly contagious,” Kuo said.
Photo provided by the New Taipei City Government’s Agriculture Department
Kuo said the incubation period for the bacterial disease is between 10 to 90 days and that it usually manifests as painless papules at the infection site and could affect tissues, organs or the entire body.
However, as syphilis has diverse clinical manifestations, with some patients showing no symptoms at all, most people are unaware they have been infected until they undergo a regular physical checkup and have a blood test, Kuo said.
Kuo also warned of the link between syphilis and HIV.
“Research has shown that as Treponema pallidum, a spiral-shaped bacterium that can cause syphilis, can penetrate mucous membranes and damaged skin areas, infection with syphilis can increase a person’s likelihood of acquiring and transmitting HIV,” he said.
“On the other hand, HIV infection may also accelerate the progression of syphilitic disease,” he said.
Kuo said that while syphilis can be cured with proper medical treatment, infected people do not gain immunity from the bacteria, and urged people suspected of having suffered from syphilis to get tested for both the disease and HIV and to use condoms during sexual intercourse.
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
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,
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