A graduation trip for more than 200 students from northern Taiwan did not end well after they were rushed to hospital earlier this week due to a suspected outbreak of norovirus.
“Of the students suspected of coming down with the illness, 140 attend New Taipei Municipal An Kang High School and about 100 attend Taipei’s Ming Hu Primary School,” Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥) said yesterday.
Chuang said health officials have collected vomit for testing to determine the cause of the outbreak, adding that the results are expected to be available on Monday at the earliest.
An Kang school authorities said 285 of the school’s second-graders traveled to Pingtung County’s Kenting (墾丁) for a four-day trip on Tuesday and stayed at the Uni-Resort (統一渡假村) for the first two nights.
However, some of the students fell ill, suffering from vomiting and diarrhea, after they had eaten breakfast at the resort on Thursday.
On the same day, nearly 300 Ming Hu Primary School sixth-graders also had breakfast at the hotel after spending the first night of a three-day trip to Kenting that began on Wednesday.
Hours after they traveled to Chiayi City the next day, a number of students started experiencing vomiting, diarrhea and fever, and sought immediate medical attention.
The Chiayi City Public Health Bureau said as of 11:30am yesterday, 113 Ming Hu students had suffered from the symptoms, as well as their bus driver.
The Pingtung County Public Health Bureau said given that students from both of the schools started feeling ill after having breakfast at the resort, it had sent health officials to inspect the hotel and to collect food samples.
“Since the resort had disposed of most of the breakfasts it served on Thursday, bureau officials were only able to sample the water and the corn flakes,” the bureau said.
It said that hygiene and the storage of food in the hotel’s kitchen was up to standard.
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,