The Centers for Diseases Control (CDC) yesterday said it would not issue a travel alert for South Korea despite Seoul’s confirmation of its first case of Zika virus infection and a specialist’s warning that the virus was likely to affect Taiwan.
A 43-year old male South Korean, who recently returned from Brazil, was diagnosed with Zika after suffering fever, muscle pain and rash, South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement yesterday.
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reported that the man, who returned home on March 11, tested positive for the mosquito-borne virus after traveling to Brazil between the middle of last month and early this month, and had been treated in quarantine at a hospital.
China Medical University Hospital Division of Contagious Diseases division chief Wang Jen-hsien (王任賢) said there are fewer mosquitoes in South Korea due to the cooler temperatures, but mosquito species such as Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus can transmit the dengue virus as well as the Zika virus, so if an infection case enters Taiwan, the likeliness of an outbreak is higher than in South Korea.
Compared with dengue infection, symptoms of Zika infection is often milder, so it can be more difficult to detect at airports, he said, adding that since the Zika virus is very likely to affect Taiwan, getting rid of vector mosquitoes is important to stave off the disease.
Later in the afternoon, the CDC said that South Korea does not have vector mosquitoes, a dengue fever epidemic or indigenous Zika cases, so infection risks from the Zika virus is considered relatively low.
As disease prevention measures are being taken at airports and harbors, the CDC said it would not issue a travel alert for South Korea for the time being.
The CDC urged people to take extra precautionary measures to prevent against Zika infection when traveling to Latin America or the Caribbean, where a travel “alert” has been issued.
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