The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is to dispatch a medical specialist today to South Korea to investigate the latest developments in a Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak, but said it has no plans to raise its travel advisory for the nation unless the virus spreads into communities.
CDC Director Steve Kuo (郭旭崧) made the remarks during a meeting of the legislature’s Social Welfare and Environmental Hygiene Committee yesterday morning, in which he said the CDC has been in close contact with its South Korean counterpart since May 20 and has obtained information regarding the outbreak situation via the International Health Regulations (IHR) Focal Point.
“We will send one of our disease prevention experts to South Korea to get a grasp of the situation there ... and provide disease prevention information to Taiwanese living in the country,” Kuo said, adding that the centers would consider dispatching more professionals depending on the development of the outbreak.
Despite the plans, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) urged the centers to roll out contingency measures at home, citing the large number of tourists traveling between Taiwan and South Korea, averaging 1.15 million per year.
Kuo said that while the virus has affected more than 1,000 people and killed approximately 400 since it first appeared in the Middle East three years ago, the scientific and medical communities have increased their understanding of it.
“Most of the cases occurred at hospitals and the virus has been shown to spread between people in close contact, such as patients and their carers,” Kuo said. “People who contracted the virus in their own community were generally affected because they had consumed camel milk or had contact with the animals.”
Kuo added that the key to detecting MERS infections is the ability to accurately determine a patient’s travel history.
CDC physician Philip Yi-chun Lo (羅一鈞) said that because early-stage MERS symptoms are similar to those of a cold, such as fever, coughing, muscle soreness and fatigue, doctors face difficulties diagnosing the disease without knowing whether a patient had visited countries in the Middle East or had close contact with camels or bats.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching