The Executive Yuan passed a draft amendment to the Organ Transplant Act (人體器官移植條例) yesterday, raising fines for those who sell organs for transplant or those who broker organ sales.
The amendment proposed by the Department of Health would subject those providing their organs for sale, organ brokers and medical institutions that perform transplants with purchased organs to fines between NT$200,000 (US$6,000) and NT$1 million, from the current NT$90,000 and NT$450,000.
The proposal will be referred to the legislature for review.
The draft seeks to tighten the rules for 18 and 19-year-olds donating part of their livers. If the proposal is passed, teens will only be allowed to donate an organ to blood relatives within five generations with the consent of their guardians. Only adults will be allowed to make liver donations to their in-laws, the draft states.
Those who want to donate their organs after death will be able to indicate this on their National Health Insurance cards, the draft states.
At present, people who are willing to be donors usually carry a card from the Organ Donation Association of the Republic of China.
The proposal would also abolish an article that obliges hospital staff to try to persuade family members of potential organ donors to donate the patients’ organs after death.
In related news, the head of the Transplantation Society of Taiwan said its research showed that about 5,000 patients had kidney transplants in the past 10 years, but almost half had the surgery in a foreign country, mostly in China.
“Many of these patients have their kidney transplants done in China, the Philippines, India, Pakistan and the US, but most go to China,” Lee Po-chang (李伯璋) said.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
EVERYONE’S ISSUE: Kim said that during a visit to Taiwan, she asked what would happen if China attacked, and was told that the global economy would shut down Taiwan is critical to the global economy, and its defense is a “here and now” issue, US Representative Young Kim said during a roundtable talk on Taiwan-US relations on Friday. Kim, who serves on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee, held a roundtable talk titled “Global Ties, Local Impact: Why Taiwan Matters for California,” at Santiago Canyon College in Orange County, California. “Despite its small size and long distance from us, Taiwan’s cultural and economic importance is felt across our communities,” Kim said during her opening remarks. Stanford University researcher and lecturer Lanhee Chen (陳仁宜), lawyer Lin Ching-chi
RSS