President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said the government was planning to donate 100,000 items of protective clothing and US$1 million in cash to help fight the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
The government is to dispatch medical experts to the region to support international efforts to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, Ma said during a meeting with Burkinabe President Blaise Compaore, who is in Taiwan to attend the National Day celebrations today.
Ma said the latest Ebola outbreak has killed thousands of people in West Africa, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and is likely to continue to expand.
As Burkina Faso is also in West Africa, Taiwan has provided funds and protective gear to its diplomatic ally to strengthen its disease control and prevention mechanism, Ma said, adding that the government would be happy to continue its cooperation with Burkina Faso to prevent the spread of the virus.
Ma also said the government would increase its sponsorship for a project to provide solar-powered LED lighting to schoolchildren in Burkina Faso, which is facing an electricity shortage, from 500,000 euros (US$633,000) to 2 million euros, because Taiwan puts a premium on education.
Ma said that during his last visit to Burkina Faso in January, teachers told him that students had made significant progress in their tests because the lighting allowed them to study at home, even at night.
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