The government-funded newborn screening service has been expanded from 11 items to 21 items, effective immediately, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday.
Using a blood test to screen for genetic metabolic disorders began in 1985 with just five items.
The number of items were increased to 11 in 2006, and the test now covers 21 items, Maternal and Child Health Division director Lin Yi-ching (林宜靜) said.
The symptoms of genetic metabolic disorders in newborns are usually hard to see and must be detected through screening, and that while the incidence of most of the diseases tested for are relatively low, if left untreated, some can result in permanent damage, she said.
The screening rate has reached 99 percent in recent years, and 3,657 out of the more than 180,000 babies tested last year were found to have inherited metabolic disorders, Lin said.
The most common disorders were glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency (G6PDD) or favism, which last year was found in 3,360 babies, followed by congenital hypothyroidism, which was found in 269, she said.
Chien Yin-hsiu (簡穎秀), an attending physician in National Taiwan University Hospital’s pediatrics and medical genetics departments, said the best time to test the babies is when they are 48 to 72 hours old, and the heel prick test needs only four drops of blood to screen for all 21 items.
Test results are available within three days, which aids in providing treatment if abnormalities are found, but if the test is delayed, this can lead to false negative results, thereby delaying the detection and treatment of inherited diseases, she said.
There have been cases in which the parents wanted to wait until their baby was covered by health insurance policies to have the test, to avoid a medical record of inherited disease, but parents should have their baby tested at the recommended time for more accurate results, Chien said.
Lin said the Financial Supervisory Commission in 2012 told insurance companies that if a newborn is insured from the day they are born, the newborn screening items should be excluded from insurance policies’ waiting periods, so parents do not need to postpone the test for this reason.
“Expanding the newborn screening from 11 items to 21 items will not mean an extra financial burden to parents,” she said.
The fee for the test remains the same, NT$350, with the rest of the costs of the testing covered by the government, Lin said.
However, for low-income households and those living in remote areas with a lack of medical resources, the fee is completely covered by the government, Lin said.
Any additional examination fees for infants who test positive for inherited metabolic disorders is funded by the government, she 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
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