Four more Chinese pork products and another pig carcass found in Kinmen County have tested positive for African swine fever, the Central Emergency Operation Center for the disease said on Thursday.
The products that tested positive for African swine fever included a pack of sausages that was sent for testing on March 26 after being found in a bin at Shuitou Pier in Kinmen, the center said.
The other infected products included a second pack of sausages and a pack of cured ham that were found in a bin at Taichung International Airport, it said.
They were dumped by a passenger who flew in from Macau and were sent for testing on March 27, the center said.
A pack of dried pork jerky was also found to be infected on being sent for testing March 31 after it was found in a bin at Kaohsiung International Airport, it said.
Samples were sent to the Council of Agriculture’s Animal Health Research Institute for testing and found to contain sequences of gene fragments identical to those of the virus strain in China, the center said.
Since October last year, 40 pork products from China have been confirmed to contain the virus — one in October, two in November, four in December, 11 in January, 11 in February, five in March and six in April, statistics on the center’s Web site show.
The pig carcass infected with African swine fever was found on a beach in Kinmen on Monday.
It was sixth dead pig to wash ashore on Taiwan’s outlying islands.
Kinmen is just 6km from Xiamen in China’s Fujian Province.
Also on Thursday, a 48-year-old Chinese national surnamed Yeh (葉) was repatriated after failing to pay a NT$200,000 (US$6,477) fine for attempting to bring a single sausage into Kinmen, a Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine official said.
Chen Ping-tsai (陳炳財), the agency’s Kinmen Inspection Station head, said that the sausage, which weighed 30g, was found in Yeh’s luggage, after the passenger disembarked from a ferry that arrived from Xiamen.
As of Sunday last week, 118 outbreaks of African swine fever had been reported in 28 Chinese provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, and about 1 million pigs have been culled, according to data published on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Web site.
Beijing could eventually see a full amphibious invasion of Taiwan as the only "prudent" way to bring about unification, the US Department of Defense said in a newly released annual report to Congress. The Pentagon's "Annual Report to Congress: Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2025," was in many ways similar to last year’s report but reorganized the analysis of the options China has to take over Taiwan. Generally, according to the report, Chinese leaders view the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) capabilities for a Taiwan campaign as improving, but they remain uncertain about its readiness to successfully seize
Taiwan is getting a day off on Christmas for the first time in 25 years. The change comes after opposition parties passed a law earlier this year to add or restore five public holidays, including Constitution Day, which falls on today, Dec. 25. The day marks the 1947 adoption of the constitution of the Republic of China, as the government in Taipei is formally known. Back then the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) governed China from Nanjing. When the KMT, now an opposition party in Taiwan, passed the legislation on holidays, it said that they would help “commemorate the history of national development.” That
Taiwan has overtaken South Korea this year in per capita income for the first time in 23 years, IMF data showed. Per capita income is a nation’s GDP divided by the total population, used to compare average wealth levels across countries. Taiwan also beat Japan this year on per capita income, after surpassing it for the first time last year, US magazine Newsweek reported yesterday. Across Asia, Taiwan ranked fourth for per capita income at US$37,827 this year due to sustained economic growth, the report said. In the top three spots were Singapore, Macau and Hong Kong, it said. South
Snow fell on Yushan (Jade Mountain, 玉山) yesterday morning as a continental cold air mass sent temperatures below freezing on Taiwan’s tallest peak, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. Snowflakes were seen on Yushan’s north peak from 6:28am to 6:38am, but they did not fully cover the ground and no accumulation was recorded, the CWA said. As of 7:42am, the lowest temperature recorded across Taiwan was minus-5.5°C at Yushan’s Fengkou observatory and minus-4.7°C at the Yushan observatory, CWA data showed. On Hehuanshan (合歡山) in Nantou County, a low of 1.3°C was recorded at 6:39pm, when ice pellets fell at Songsyue Lodge (松雪樓), a
RSS