Taiwanese doctors in Hualien on Friday successfully separated a pair of conjoined twin sisters who shared a liver.
Ludy de Gusman, mother of the 15-month-old twins, burst into tears of relief and gratitude when the operation finished after almost eight hours at the Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital’s branch in the county.
Gusman said she was very grateful to the medical team for helping to give the sisters normal lives.
Photo: CNA
Prior to the surgery, Gusman said, she had shut herself and her daughters off from the outside world and remained confined to their home for a year so that the people in her village in the Philippines would not laugh at them.
Lee Ming-che (李明哲), head of the hospital’s department of surgery, commented on the length of the operation, saying that he and his team took extra care to reduce the amount of blood loss, as experience has shown them that surgery involving the liver causes the most-severe blood loss.
The twins — Jennelyn Mendoza de Gusman and Jerrelyn Mendoza de Gusman — were brought to Taiwan for the surgery after head of the Hualien hospital Kao Jui-ho (高瑞和) met them at a free clinic event in the Philippines’ Bautista municipality in November last year.
Volunteers of the Hualien-based Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu-Chi Foundation in the Philippines helped to raise funds for the operation and the twins arrived in Taiwan on Jan. 9 for preliminary care, which included tissue expansion for skin grafts and liver reconstruction.
Chen Peir-rong (陳培榕), the deputy head of the hospital, who organized the team that carried out the surgery, said the procedure was easier than previous operations on conjoined twins, as the liver was the only organ shared by the sisters.
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,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods