Government-funded influenza vaccinations are to begin today and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) urged nine groups of people who are eligible for free shots to get vaccinated as soon as possible for better protection throughout the flu season.
The nine groups eligible for government-funded flu vaccinations are: those aged 50 or older; pregnant women and parents of infant under six months old; pre-school children older than six months; elementary, junior-high and high-school students; and students at vocational schools or in grades 1, 2 or 3 at a five-year junior college, and children and adolescents in resettlement.
Also included are healthcare and public-health practitioners; disease-prevention personnel, livestock industry workers, animal disease prevention personnel; people who work at nursing homes or long-term care facilities; and people who work at nurseries or preschools.
Elementary-school students and older students can get vaccinated at school from next month and others eligible for free vaccinations can go to a local public health center or a contracted healthcare facility.
The CDC said about 6 million government-funded vaccines were purchased for this flu season, enough for about one-quarter of the population.
The free vaccines would be given to hospitals first and allocated to temporary community vaccination stations and public health centers as they become available, it said.
As the antibodies decline over time and the seasonal flu vaccine aims to protect against the most commonly circulating strains that year, people are encouraged to get vaccinated every year for better protection, it 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