The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said that 118 hospitals nationwide next month would start treating people with latent tuberculosis (TB) using a medication that can decrease the course of treatment from about nine months to about three months.
The CDC said that about 10 percent of people with latent tuberculosis have a lifetime risk of developing tuberculosis, especially within the first year after initial infection and when their immune system becomes weak, so having regular checkups and proper treatment is important.
An antibiotic called isoniazid is the most common treatment for latent and active tuberculosis and is taken daily for nine months. However, sometimes patients forget to take their medication or stop taking it before the course is finished, which can lead to drug resistance.
The CDC trialed using a combination of antibiotics — rifapentine and isoniazid taken weekly for three months — at 77 hospitals. As of June 30, 639 people had been given the medications and 33 people had completed the treatment.
It said the prescription rate of the new drug had reached 61 percent at the 77 hospitals, surpassing the rate of isoniazid, so it plans to provide the drug combination to 118 hospitals starting next month for an estimated 2,200 patients, which is expected to reduce active tuberculosis cases by 220 people each year.
Meanwhile, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Director Liu Ting-ping (劉定萍) said communicable diseases, such as Japanese encephalitis and scrub typhus, are both at the peaks of the epidemic curve.
Japanese encephalitis is more prevalent in central and southern Taiwan, as well as Hualien County. Scrub typhus is more prevalent in Hualien, Taitung and on the outlying islands.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods