Taiwan has donated funds and equipment to help its allies in west Africa combat the Ebola outbreak in the region, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs official said yesterday.
More than 15,000 people in west Africa are believed to have contracted the Ebola virus, and more than 5,400 have died over the past few months.
New cases have hit Mali.
Burkina Faso and Sao Tome and Principe — both allies —have sought help, Department of West Asian and African Affairs Deputy Director-General Alexandre Cheng (鄭維) said.
Taiwan has donated four body temperature scanners for the airport in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, Cheng said.
“We also donated US$20,000 to Sao Tome and Principe in September” to train airport and port staff and medical workers, as well as boost public awareness, he said.
“So far, there have been no Ebola cases reported in those two countries, but we will continue to monitor developments,” he said.
Taiwan also donated protective gear last week through a program with the US, the ministry said, sending 100,000 coveralls and 100,000 masks to Senegal.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
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