Liver diseases kill 13,000 Taiwanese each year on average, but nearly 90 percent of respondents to a recent survey by the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) thought that drinking was the main cause of such illnesses, which is a common misconception.
Released on the eve of World Hepatitis Day, the survey showed that of the 3,515 respondents, aged from 25 to 64, only 70 percent were able to accurately identify hepatitis B and and 54 percent identify hepatitis C as major causes of liver disease.
While 90 percent of those polled were aware that hepatitis B and hepatitis C required regular medical checks and could be controlled with medication, 30 percent of people with hepatitis had not sought medical advice, the telephone-based poll suggested.
Reasons cited for not seeking medical advice included the absence of distressing symptoms (80 percent) and a lack of time (8 percent), it showed.
“In Taiwan, about 13,000 people die of hepatitis, cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer each year. Liver diseases are responsible for causing 8 percent of the nation’s annual total deaths, ahead of diabetes at 6 percent and high blood pressure at 3 percent,” HPA Director-General Chiou Shu-ti (邱淑媞) said at a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
Chiou said research shows that an abdominal ultrasound every six months could lower the risk of death from liver cancer for hepatitis B patients in the 35-to-39 age group by 37 percent.
The chances of those patients developing liver cancer could also be reduced by more than 60 percent if they received medical treatment, she added.
Chiou said people who waited until the onset of severe symptoms to see a doctor are like people living in the stone age, urging people to stay abreast of medical knowledge rather than clinging to outdated misconceptions.
The administration said that there were more than 500 medical institutions and local health centers across the country that offered hepatitis care and follow-up checks.
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