The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus yesterday blamed Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) for an outbreak of dengue fever in the city, while Tainan City Council Speaker Lee Chuan-chiao (李全教) railed against Lai for boycotting city council sessions, attributing the outbreak to his absence.
More than 1,000 cases of dengue fever, two of which have been fatal, have been reported so far in Tainan.
Two KMT Tainan city councilors showed up at a news conference held by the KMT caucus in Taipei to accuse Lai of neglecting the health of the city’s residents.
KMT Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) said Lai, a member of the Democratic Progressive Party, has been preoccupied with a dispute with the Control Yuan while 23 of the city’s 37 districts have reported cases of dengue.
“The fact that Tainan is in the middle of an outbreak shows that Lai, who is also a physician, has not been attentive [to municipal affairs],” she said.
KMT Legislator Chen Shu-hui (陳淑慧) urged the central government to hold Lai accountable for his boycott of city council meetings, which has resulted in city officials breaking the law and disease-prevention work going unfinished.
Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who was invited by the caucus to participate in the news conference, said the outbreak intensified after high temperatures and heavy rain in May and June, and that most of the city’s residents lack immunity to the strain of dengue that has been prevalent this year.
Chuang said the agency has sent teams to help the city government with preventive measures.
Meanwhile in Tainan, Lee accused Lai of tainting the city’s reputation and hurting its tourism industry with his boycott of city council meetings, which he said could have facilitated cooperation between the city government and the council on a budget increase for disease prevention.
Lai yesterday said that the dengue outbreak this year has been serious, adding that this strain of the disease has not been observed in the city in more than a decade.
Lai said the city government has not been sufficiently vigilant, as last year Tainan had only 200 cases, while neighboring Kaohsiung had more than 10,000. However, he said city authorities were undertaking necessary action, including handing out penalties to people found with exposed containers of water, which mosquitoes can use to breed.
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
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,
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