The Central Epidemic Command Center is to refocus its efforts against the dengue fever epidemic in southern Taiwan from Tainan to Kaohsiung, where more than 400 new cases were reported on Wednesday.
A total of 458 new dengue fever cases were recorded nationwide on Wednesday — 429 of which were reported in Kaohsiung — pushing the total number of cases since May 1 to 35,345, according to the center, which was established in mid-September to tackle the disease.
A three-day campaign to destroy breeding grounds for mosquitoes that transmit the disease was launched in Kaohsiung on Thursday, the center said.
Neighboring Tainan, which has been hit the hardest in the current outbreak with 22,461 cases since May, has seen the spread of the disease slow for the eighth consecutive week, recording only 17 new cases on Wednesday.
Vice Premier Simon Chang (張善政), who heads the center, instructed the Tourism Bureau to offer Tainan assistance to rebuild its tourism industry, which has suffered as a result of the outbreak.
Meanwhile, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alicia Wang (王育敏) and the party’s Kaohsiung city councilors held a press conference in Taipei, in which they urged Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊), who is also serving as campaign manager for opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), to stop campaigning and focus on running her city.
DPP Legislator Chiu Chih-wei (邱志偉) of Kaohsiung said the Kaohsiung City Government is mobilizing 1,500 people per day to keep the outbreak in check, and accused the KMT politicians of trying to manipulate Tsai’s campaign.
The current epidemic has been the worst since authorities began keeping records, with the total number of cases more than double the previous annual high of 15,732.
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
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