A group of medical professionals yesterday urged the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) to not allow further evacuation flights from China unless three criteria are met to better ensure disease prevention.
There has been significant criticism over the passenger list and disease prevention measures for the first flight, on Monday, that evacuated Taiwanese from Wuhan, the epicenter of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak.
Many vulnerable Taiwanese who should have been given priority were replaced on the flight by Chinese spouses or family members. Of three passengers who were not on the original list, one was confirmed to have the disease shortly after arriving in Taiwan.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
In addition, passengers were not given protective gear during the flight.
Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency on Friday quoted China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) as saying that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was using “giving priority to the vulnerable and ensuring disease prevention” as an excuse to shed responsibility and mislead the public, as well as delay the process of returning people to Taiwan.
Surgeon Wu Hsin-tai (吳欣岱) on Friday launched a petition urging the government to firmly stick to its disease prevention principles and safeguard Taiwan from the virus.
The petition demands that Taipei decide the passenger lists for evacuation flights from Wuhan, that flights include Taiwanese disease control personnel and that evacuees should only be accepted if there are enough local health resources.
Wu, former DPP legislator Lin Ching-yi (林靜儀), who is an obstetrician, and Taipei Doctors Union executive director Chang Chao-cheng (張詔程), as well as representatives of several medical groups, yesterday took the petition to the Mainland Affairs Council in Taipei.
Having more than 200 people confined to an airplane cabin with someone who is infected puts all passengers at risk, Wu said, adding that as Taiwan’s medical resources are limited — with only about 1,100 negative pressure isolation wards — the government should not accept unlimited evacuation flights from China.
The petition was signed by 111,761 medical professionals in one day, one-third of the nation’s registered medical professionals, she said.
Of the signatories, 15.1 percent are physicians and 47.9 percent are nurses, she added.
Separately yesterday, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that “it is meaningless to get involved in a political war of words when we are dealing with professional disease prevention.”
“We are fighting against a virus from Wuhan, not fighting against Wuhan,” he said, adding that all disease prevention policies have been undertaken according to professional assessments of infection risks, not based on bilateral relations.
MAC Deputy Minister Lee Li-jane (李麗珍) said that the medical professionals’ demands are in line with the council’s principles and that it would make sure they are implemented.
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