The Control Yuan yesterday censured the Department of Health (DOH) along with the Kaohsiung City and Kaohsiung County governments for their failure to prevent the spread of dengue fever, which has killed 13 people this year in the worst outbreak since the 1980s.
"The ongoing spread of dengue fever cases has seriously threatened the health of Taiwan citizens. The Department of Health, Kaohsiung City Government and Kaohsiung County Government have obviously been in dereliction of duty in their failure to control its spread," said Li You-chi (
The censure comes at the worst possible time for DPP Kaohsiung mayor Frank Hsieh (
According to the Control Yuan report, the DOH discontinued a program to prevent the disease which had been in place for 11 years, although it had been highly effective.
The DOH ended the program in 2000 after concluding that the number of dengue fever cases, which had declined to about 100 per year, could be contained by the nation's conventional medical infrastructure.
The report also said that the Kaohsiung city and county epidemic prevention workers were insufficiently trained and criticized both administrations for not employing their own personnel.
The report noted that between January and May of this year, there were 11 cases of dengue fever in Kaohsiung City, to which the city government paid scant attention. The disease began to spread in mid-June, but a citywide prevention plan was not proposed until August.
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
US President Donald Trump said "it’s up to" Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be "very unhappy" with a change in the "status quo," the New York Times said in an interview published yesterday. Xi "considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing," Trump told the newspaper on Wednesday. "But I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that," he added. "I hope he doesn’t do that." Trump made the comments in
Tourism in Kenting fell to a historic low for the second consecutive year last year, impacting hotels and other local businesses that rely on a steady stream of domestic tourists, the latest data showed. A total of 2.139 million tourists visited Kenting last year, down slightly from 2.14 million in 2024, the data showed. The number of tourists who visited the national park on the Hengchun Peninsula peaked in 2015 at 8.37 million people. That number has been below 2.2 million for two years, although there was a spike in October last year due to multiple long weekends. The occupancy rate for hotels
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
RSS