The Ministry of Health and Welfare is considering opening additional antivenom redistribution centers in central Taiwan, following serum shortages that affected snake-bite victims, it said on Thursday.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily on Wednesday reported that a 40-year-old man was bitten by a snake while visiting Pingtung County’s Kenting Township (墾丁) with family.
Doctors first diagnosed it as a non-venomous snake bite, but the wound continued to swell after the man returned to his Taichung home, the newspaper said, adding that a local hospital confirmed that the man had been bitten by a venomous Formosan Russel’s viper.
Photo: Yeh Yung-chien, Taipei Times
China Medical University Hospital Department of Toxicology director Hung Tung-jung (洪東榮) said that he was surprised to learn that the hospital had no serum for the Formosan Russel’s viper on hand.
Neither did other major hospitals in central Taiwan keep a supply of the serum, as its preservation period is relatively short, Hung said.
He said he had to make a same-day roundtrip by high-speed rail to Taipei Veterans General Hospital to obtain the serum and administered it on his return.
Serum for the Formosan Russel’s viper is considered an “orphan drug” under the Rare Disease and Orphan Drug Act (罕見疾病防治及藥物法), the ministry said, adding that it is best administered within two hours after a person is bitten by the snake.
National Health Insurance Administration data showed that on average only three people per year require the serum, compared with 998 who are injected with antivenom for the brown spotted pit viper and the green bamboo viper every year.
Based on distance to hospitals, hospital equipment and the national distribution of the Formosan Russel’s viper population, the serum is mostly distributed in eastern Taiwan, the ministry said.
However, it said it would consider establishing more centers in central Taiwan.
The public can look up which establishments nearby have specific serums and in what quantity on its Web site, the ministry added.
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
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
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