HEALTH
Cancer cases increasing
One person was diagnosed with cancer in Taiwan every 5 minutes, 6 seconds in 2014, 12 seconds faster than the previous year, according to Health Promotion Administration data released on Thursday. In 2014, Taiwan saw 103,147 new cancer patients, an increase of 4,004 from the previous year, the agency said. For the ninth consecutive year, colon cancer was the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the nation, followed by lung, breast, liver and oral cancer, the agency said. It was the first time new breast cancer cases have outnumbered liver cancer cases. Rounding out the top 10 were prostate, gastric, skin, thyroid and esophageal cancers, the agency said. The age-standardized incidence rate was 303.8 out of every 100,000 people that year, or 341.4 out of every 100,000 men and 271.4 out of every 100,000 women. The 10 most common cancers among men were colon, liver, lung, oral, prostate, esophageal, gastric, skin and bladder cancers, as well as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Among women, the top 10 were cancer of the breast, colon, lung, liver, thyroid, uterine corpus, ovaries, cervix, skin and stomach.
FISHERIES
FRI releases baby crabs
The government-run Fisheries Research Institute (FRI) on Wednesday released 150,000 baby Portunus pelagicus crabs, more popularly called the flower crab or sand crab, into the ocean off Penghu County’s Magong City as part of an ongoing effort to promote the sustainable use of marine resources. The baby crabs, each about 1cm to 2cm in size, were bred by the institute, FRI director Lin Chin-jung (林金榮) said. With its nutritious sweet meat, the sand crab is considered a delicacy, Lin said. At local markets, the crab sells for up to NT$700 per kilogram.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the