HEALTH
TBC calls for blood donations
The Taipei Blood Center (TBC) on Sunday called for donations after its blood supply on Saturday fell below an officially designated safe level. The center supplies blood to Taipei, New Taipei City and Keelung, and Yilan and Hualien counties, which on average need 2,023 bags of blood per day, TBC official Chen Ya-wen (陳雅雯) said. The designated safe level of seven days’ worth of blood amounts to about 14,000 bags, but as of Saturday there were only 8,740 bags of blood left, enough for about 4.3 days, Chen said. There were 3,274 bags of type O blood, 2,378 bags of type A blood, 2,310 bags of type B blood and 778 bags of type AB blood, according to data from the Taiwan Blood Services Foundation, which runs the center. Blood donation sites can be found online at TBC’s Web site, www.tp.blood.org.tw.
EDUCATION
Taiwan wins five awards
Taiwanese high-school students won five awards at the annual Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Friday. The competition, said to be the largest international pre-college science competition in the world, brought together nearly 1,800 students from 81 nations for the seven-day event from Sunday to Saturday last week. Taiwan was represented by eight science, technology, engineering and math projects presented by 14 students, who were selected by the National Taiwan Science Education Center. The highest honor Taiwan received was second place, given to Yen Po-hsun (顏伯勳) and Lee Shang-jung (李尚融) of Concordia Middle School, a junior and high-school institution in Chiayi City, in the engineering category for their “spherical induction motor with hexahedron stator for attitude control.” The students are to return home tomorrow.
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