The Taipei City Department of Health yesterday reported an imported case of dengue fever, which involved a Malaysian teenager who traveled to Taiwan with his family last week.
The 16-year-old tested positive for dengue fever after seeking medical attention at a local hospital on Saturday, the department said.
The patient told his doctor that he was diagnosed with dengue fever in Malaysia on Friday, but because his condition improved without experiencing a fever, he decided to travel to Taiwan as planned, the department said, adding that the tourist has left Taiwan.
As of yesterday, 79 indigenous cases of dengue fever and 64 imported cases have been recorded in Taipei, the department said.
In related news, a two-day international conference on dengue fever prevention and control sponsored by Taiwan and the US opened yesterday in Tainan, the hardest-hit region in the outbreak of the disease this year.
Nineteen experts from 10 other nations where dengue fever poses a threat — Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, India and Papua New Guinea — joined the forum, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.
The conference is to move to Taipei today for expert discussion.
It is the second public health meeting under the Taiwan-US Global Cooperation and Training Framework, launched in June.
The first one, held in August by Taiwan and US public health agencies, involved an “International Training Course on Molecular Diagnosis for MERS-CoV.”
More than 40,000 cases of dengue fever have been reported in Taiwan since May, when the outbreak began. Of those, 22,691 had been reported in Tainan as of Sunday.
Tainan reported two additional new cases on Sunday, indicating that the epidemic there has abated.
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