HEALTH
Taipei sprayed for insects
Two districts in Taipei sprayed pesticides yesterday after the city confirmed its first case of dengue fever for the year the previous day, environmental officials said. A man who lives in Shilin District (士林) and studies in Xinyi District (信義) developed dengue fever symptoms, including fever and joint pain, on Friday last week after taking a school trip in northern Taiwan from Sept. 5 to Sept. 7. While the Taipei City Government Department of Health declined to reveal where the trip went, it said the student could have been infected in Taipei. As a result, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection sprayed pesticide in Shilin and Xinyi districts to prevent the virus from spreading. According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the nation recorded 2,235 cases of dengue fever this year as of Thursday, with 2,083 of them being indigenous.
AVIATION
Airport expansion outlined
An upcoming expansion project of Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport will increase the airport’s passenger capacity by 5 million people per year, Minister of Transportation and Communications Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) said on Thursday during the Trinity Forum, a leading global airport commercial revenue conference being held in Taipei. The event was organized by Airports Council International (ACI), ACI Asia-Pacific and The Moodie Report. The project to enlarge the airport’s Terminal 2 is set to begin by the end of this year and is expected to be completed in 18 months, Yeh said. Last year, the airport received more than 30 million passengers, with an additional 1.5 million passengers expected this year, exceeding its design capacity, Yeh said. To ease congestion, the government is building a third terminal, which would increase annual capacity to 45 million people, he said. The design for the third terminal will start next year, with construction expected to be completed by 2020, the minister added.
HEALTH
Doctors link stroke to diet
A nine-year-old boy experienced a stroke recently due to his diet consisting largely of fast food, such as fried chicken and French fries, a doctor said. Huang Bing-wen (黃炳文), a doctor at Show Chwan Memorial Hospital in Changhua County, said the boy, who is 1.3m tall and weighs 31kg, comes from a family that does not have a history of strokes. His father told the physician that the boy leads a sedentary lifestyle, spending most of his time playing computer games and rarely exercising. The boy recently complained of nausea and dizziness. His father took him to see a doctor after he bumped into a bathroom basin. The doctor found that an artery in the boy’s brain was blocked by a clot and prescribed anti-clot drugs.
DEVELOPMENT
Nation ranked 21st
The nation ranked 21st among 188 countries in terms of how well its people are developing, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics said. The agency used the methodology of the Huang Development Index compiled by the UN, which measures life expectancy, education and income to rank countries. The index was published by the UN Development Program, but the government collected the nation’s statistics and returned a score of 0.882. A score close to 1 is better, whereas a ranking closer to zero is not ideal. Norway was at the top of the list, with a score of 0.944, followed by Australia at 0.933 and Switzerland at 0.917.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: