With the rabies virus mainly found in ferret-badgers, agriculture authorities in collaboration with the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) have developed an oral rabies vaccine-laced bait that is intended to control the disease in the wild, the Council of Agriculture said on Thursday.
The rabies virus was detected in wild ferret-badgers in 2013, after Taiwan had been free of the disease since the early 1960s, prompting the council’s Animal Health Research Institute (AHRI) and the OIE Reference Laboratory for Rabies to cooperate in 2014 in the development of rabies antibody tests, AHRI biologics division head Tseng Chun-hsien (曾俊憲) said.
Last year, a safety and efficacy evaluation of the oral rabies vaccine for Formosan ferret-badgers was completed and none of the 15 vaccinated animals died or showed any clinical signs of the disease during the 180-day observation period, Tseng said.
The bait includes eggs, pork and beef. Researchers have also tried using the ingredients in the development of other oral rabies vaccine baits and have conducted oral rabies vaccine safety tests on masked palm civets, Tseng said.
These experiments are expected to achieve breakthroughs next year and in 2020, Tseng added.
It took France 10 to 20 years to eliminate rabies in the country after the use of safe, but potent, rabies vaccines, Tseng said.
Given the small size of Taiwan, where ferret-badgers mostly live in low-lying hills, the use of rabies vaccines could shorten the time it takes to eliminate it here, he said.
Meanwhile, the AHRI in June joined the OIE Twinning project, partnering with France’s Nancy Laboratory for Rabies and Wildlife to enhance diagnostic capacity and expertise at AHRI and help the institute qualify as an OIE Reference Laboratory, Tseng said.
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