Citizen of the Earth yesterday launched a school flag program, which asks elementary-school faculties and students in Greater Kaohsiung and Pingtung County to heed the potential impact of elevated levels of air pollution by raising a red flag as a warning to remind children to avoid outdoor activities whenever poor air quality is recorded.
The environmental group called on students and teachers to maintain a record based on measurements taken at local air quality survey stations each morning before the first class and raise a red flag whenever the Pollutant Standards Index (PSI) or PM2.5 Index reaches “level 4,” to remind people on campus to wear a mask and avoid going outside of the classrooms.
The survey station data is available on the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) Web site.
According to EPA criteria, PSI “level 4” is “very unhealthy” and could cause increased symptoms among people with allergies or impair their exercise tolerance, while also threatening a range of conditions among healthy people. The WHO has listed PM2.5 as a “Group 1” carcinogen.
Group deputy director-general Wang Min-ling (王敏玲) said that growing children are especially vulnerable to pollution, so special attention is required to safeguard their health.
Out of the eight air quality management areas designated nationwide by the EPA, the one comprising Greater Kaohsiung and Pingtung has consecutively recorded the worst air quality, Wang said.
She said the area is troubled by a range of pollution sources, including the volatile organic compounds (VOC) emitted by its dense petrochemical complexes, ozone created in extended periods of sunlight and nitrogen dioxides.
Furthermore, China Steel Corp’s refineries, as well as fossil fuel power plants and the very high number of scooters amid the lack of a convenient mass transit system all contribute to the area’s serious air pollution problems, she said.
So far, Wen-fu Elementary School in Kaohsiung’s Zuoying District (左營) and Ganghe Elementary School in Siaogang District (小港) have agreed to join the flag program.
“We hope that the two schools will inspire more schools to follow up on the practice,” Wang said.
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