A 55-year-old man from Taitung County was discharged from Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital yesterday after being given a second chance at life thanks to a kidney transplant, an opportunity that would have been unlikely were it not for the government’s recently implemented organ transplant policy.
The man, surnamed Chen (陳), had been on the national waiting list for a pair of kidneys — the most sought-after organ in the country — after his diabetes led to kidney failure two years ago and he was put in the 2,438th spot.
Things took a turn for the better for Chen after the Ministry of Health and Welfare revised its organ transplant policy in September to allow people requiring transplants to take precedence over other candidates on the waiting list if their spouse or a third-degree relative was an organ or tissue donor.
According to the Civil Code, a person’s first-degree relative is a parent or child; second-degree is a grandparent, grandchild or sibling; and third-degree relatives are great-grandparents, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces and great-grandchildren.
Chen’s elder sister donated her son’s organs 18 years ago after he died in a traffic accident, which meant Chen was moved to the top of the waiting list last week.
“Although I never expected that my little brother would one day benefit from my son’s organs, I am most grateful for the selfless kindness of the donor whose kidneys gave my brother a new lease of life,” Chen’s sister told a news conference held to celebrate her brother’s discharge in Hualien.
The hospital’s organ donation and transplant center director, Lee Ming-che (李明哲), said the insufficient number of donor organs is a global problem and that only about 300 out of the more than 6,000 patients waiting for kidneys each year actually receive a transplant.
Taiwan Organ Registry and Sharing Center statistics show that there are 8,585 people on the transplant waiting list, including 6,431 people who are waiting for donor kidneys, 1,234 for livers and 662 for corneas.
“Despite the high demand, we have observed a remarkable increase in the number of organ donors since the implementation of the new policy, with 33 in the last month alone. The number of people registering as organ donors has also been on the rise,” center chief executive officer Chiang Yang-jen (江仰仁) said.
Chen is the second patient to have benefited from the new regulation. A 68-year-old Changhua County man with cirrhosis and liver cancer was given priority for a new liver in October due to his decision to donate his brother’s organs in 2001 after a car accident left him brain-dead.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
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
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,