Taipei’s first case of avian influenza virus this year was confirmed on Tuesday, after two sparrows with the disease were found dead in Taichung last week.
A dead pigeon was found on the roof of an apartment in Taipei’s Wenshan District (文山) on Thursday last week and a subsequent test showed that it was infected with an unidentified strain of the H5 subtype bird flu virus, the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine said on Tuesday.
The bureau said it is extremely rare for the disease to affect pigeons, adding that the case could be an isolated incident and the pigeon might have come into contact with virus-carrying migrating birds.
The bureau said that there has been no human infections reported, but cautioned people against touching bird feces or corpses.
The pigeon’s death came after two sparrows were found dead in Taichung on Saturday last week.
National Taiwan University veterinary professor Lai Shiow-suey (賴秀穗) yesterday said that wild birds and waterfowl, unlike migratory birds, show few symptoms and low mortality rates when infected with the bird flu virus, but a spate of mortal infections involving pigeons, sparrows and bulbuls in urban areas is a worrying sign.
“I believe that the H5 viruses have mutated with local viruses and created a deadly strain. We do not know how it entered Taiwan. The pigeon and sparrow cases suggested that the viruses have spread to urban areas and potentially every part of the nation,” Lai said.
He said pigeons do not travel far and live within a 3km radius, so it is more likely that the dead pigeon found in Taipei contracted the disease from exposure to a disease-carrying wild bird, rather than migratory birds.
The H5N2 strains of avian influenza are not known to infect humans, unlike the H5N1 and H7N9 viruses reported in China, he said.
A farm in Changhua County’s Erlin Township (二林) culled 23,736 broiler chickens on Tuesday after poultry on the farm were found to be infected with the H5N2 virus, following the cull of 13,620 turkeys on Saturday in the county’s Dacheng Township (大城).
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