Amid the increasing popularity of e-cigarettes at schools, Taichung city councilors are urging the city government to follow Hsinchu City’s and New Taipei City’s lead by drafting an ordinance to prohibit vaping for students under the age of 18.
Taichung City Councilor Chu Nuan-ying (朱暖英) said that, unlike smoking cigarettes, vaping involves inhaling a vaporized liquid mixed with distinctive flavors from an electronic device, and has become popular among young students.
Many adults do not know what e-cigarettes contain, and the same is true for underage students, she added.
About 38,000 junior-high and high-school students have tried e-cigarettes, Health Promotion Administration data showed.
For high-school and vocational school students, the percentage who use e-cigarettes increased from 1.9 percent in 2014 to 3.5 percent last year.
E-cigarettes are not subject to the Tobacco Hazard Prevention Act (菸害防制法), as vaporized liquids, also known as e-liquids, do not meet the definition of a “cigarette” as stated in the act, Chu said.
Some manufacturers might add drugs or other addictive substances into e-liquids to increase sales, raising serious concern about the health risks, she said, adding that the Taichung Education Bureau should help teachers, students and parents gain a proper understanding of e-cigarettes and their contents.
Taichung City Counselor Hsu Hsuan-feng (徐瑄灃) said the bureau should include e-cigarettes into the Chun-hui Project — a campaign launched by the central government in 1990 to prevent the use of cigarettes, alcohol, drugs and betel nuts at schools — and ban students from using new types of devices, such as e-cigarettes or heat-not-burn tobacco products.
In response, the bureau said the city government has launched workshops and lectures to equip teachers and students with sufficient knowledge of how cigarette and e-cigarettes harm the body.
It added that it has drafted an ordinance to prevent e-cigarette hazards, saying that if the law is passed, e-cigarettes would be banned from use on all campuses.
The bureau would demand that each school incorporate e-cigarette regulations into its own rules as well, it 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