Lung cancer was the leading cause of death among Taiwanese women last year, accounting for 3,141 deaths, or an average of 8.6 a day, the Formosa Cancer Foundation said earlier this week.
For 28 years, lung cancer has been the cancer that has killed the most women in the nation and the incidence of lung adenocarcinoma among female non-smokers is now five times higher than it was 20 years ago, foundation chief executive Lai Chi-ming (賴基銘) said.
A study by Hsiung Chao (熊昭), head of the Institute of Population Health Sciences at the National Health Research Institutes, found that exposure to secondhand cigarette smoke, either at home or at work, could raise the risk of lung cancer by a factor of 1.32.
The risk factor increases to 1.73 in cases where there is exposure both at home and at work, the study found.
Hsiung’s study also showed that exposure to a cooking environment, such as a kitchen, 144 times in a year increases the risk of lung cancer by 178 percent.
While women’s risk of getting lung cancer is related to secondhand cigarette smoke exposure, cooking in a poorly ventilated room is definitely a “major factor,” Hsiung said.
Family history is another significant factor, raising lung cancer risk sevenfold, he said.
Lai, a population health scientist, said that lung cancer is usually not detected in the early stages and by the time it is diagnosed it is often too late to treat.
“That’s why the fatality rate is so high,” he said.
In cases of early detection, lung cancer can be curable, Lai said, urging the public to have regular health checks.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
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,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift