Doctors yesterday urged elderly people to get a pneumococcal vaccine along with the seasonal flu vaccine for better protection.
“Getting pneumonia is much easier than getting a Golden Bell Award,” entertainer Hu Gua (胡瓜), who on Saturday won the television award for best variety show host, told a news conference in Taipei to raise public awareness of pneumonia and encourage vaccination.
Hu Gua said he quit smoking and started exercising regularly after being hospitalized twice for pneumonia, with symptoms including high fever and difficulty breathing.
He urged people above 65 years old to get vaccinated against pneumonia.
Pneumonia is a common serious complication of seasonal flu, and it was the third-leading cause of death in Taiwan last year and the year before, said Huang Yi-wen (黃伊文), a physician at the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Changhua Hospital and a member of the Taiwan Society of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.
The number of deaths from pneumonia has doubled from 10 years ago, Huang said.
As older people tend to have more difficulty swallowing, reduced mucociliary clearance, weaker immune systems and other chronic diseases, a flu infection can more easily lead to serious complications, including pneumonia, he added.
Doctors face three major challenges when treating pneumonia: identifying the pathogenic source of the infection; using higher concentrations of antibiotics to reach deep into the lungs; and dealing with Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria that have developed a resistance to multiple classes of antibiotics, Huang said.
Infectious Disease Society of Taiwan chairman Huang Li-min (黃立民), a pediatrician at National Taiwan University Hospital, said that getting vaccinated is still the best way to prevent flu and pneumonia.
A study has suggested that getting a pneumococcal vaccine along with a seasonal flu vaccine can reduce the risk of death from pneumonia by 26 percent, he said.
The government-funded flu vaccination program is to begin on Monday next week, the doctors said, urging people who are worried about their health condition to consult a doctor on whether they should get vaccinated.
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