A festival promoting cardiovascular disease prevention through healthy lifestyle habits was held by the Taiwan Heart Foundation and the Taiwan Society of Cardiology in Taipei yesterday, ahead of World Heart Day on Sept. 29
According to the WHO, cardiovascular diseases were the number one cause of death throughout the world last year.
In 2012, heart diseases killed 17.5 million people, about 30 percent of all deaths, and among them 7.4 million people died of ischaemic heart disease and 6.7 million from stroke.
Taiwan Society of Cardiology professor Chen Wen-chung (陳文鍾) said air pollution affected cardiovascular health, where high-density airborne particulate matter (PM2.5, particles under 2.5 micrometers in diameter) can permeate the lungs and enter the bloodstream, harming health.
“Preliminary results from a recent study showed that the number of patients suffering from a sudden stroke or heart failure increased in between the second and the fourth day after a sandstorm,” Chen said, adding that air pollution can cause not only respiratory, but also cardiovascular diseases.
Taiwan Society of Cardiology president Yeh San-jou (葉森洲) said while a global aging population and urbanization are factors that lead to high cardiovascular disease death statistics, the main cause of these chronic diseases are unhealthy lifestyle choices.
Taiwan Heart Foundation deputy executive-manager Yeh Hung-i (葉宏一) encouraged the public to prevent cardiovascular diseases by regularly undergoing physical examinations and eating fresh food with less oil, salt and sugar.
Using the stairs or riding bicycles more often — not only for exercise, but also to relieve stress and can also have health benefits — adding that performing physical activities, such as brisk walking, dancing and doing house chores, for over 150 minutes each week is also beneficial, Yeh said.
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