The Northern Taiwan Society, the Taiwan Association of University Professors and other organizations protested outside the Control Yuan in Taipei yesterday to demand a judicial investigation and the impeachment of top health officials for dereliction of duty during the latest tainted cooking oil scandal.
Representatives from the groups called on the government watchdog to do its job by launching a judicial probe, because they said government officials have been negligent and shown to be incompetent for allowing food scandals to keep occuring, ruining the health of the public.
Foremost on their list of demands was that the Control Yuan investigate Minister of Health and Welfare Chiang Been-huang (蔣丙煌), former acting minister of health and welfare Lin Tzou-yien (林奏延) and Food and Drug Administration Acting Director-General Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美).
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Northern Taiwan Society chairman Chang Yeh-sen (張葉森) said the Control Yuan must take up the investigation because the three top health officials failed in their duties to safeguard the health of consumers, and many people have suffered illnesses and medical conditions as a result.
Chang said that when the three were in charge of the health ministry they knew on Oct. 9 that Ting Hsin International Group (頂新國際集團) companies were using animal-feed-grade oil and other substandard oils to make food products, yet still allowed the products to be sold until Oct. 22.
“The Ma administration and these three officials were in collusion with the unscrupulous food companies. Together they protected the companies, which made big profits by selling toxic oil and tainted food to consumers. The public are suffering because they are killing us with their poisons,” Chang said.
Chen Ta-cheng (陳達成), a Northern Taiwan Society lawyer, said prosecutors are only investigating the companies.
“Are there no problems with the government officials?” Chen asked.
“If the government was not secretly protecting and helping these unscrupulous companies, would these food scandals keep on happening?” he asked.
Hung Chung-yen (洪崇晏), a leader of the Sunflower movement who is a member of the Taiwan Forever organization, said too many food scandals and abuses of power have occurred in the past few years.
“However, in this administration, officials just wash their hands of the matter as if no one can be held responsible,” Hung said.
“We should have ‘responsible politics,’ where officials not doing their jobs properly are impeached. So we are asking for this government and its top officials to bear the legal responsibility for the series of food scandals,” he said.
After presenting their petition to the Control Yuan, representatives of the groups headed to the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office to request that it launch a judicial probe into the three senior health officials.
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
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:
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
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