It is not unusual for mothers to stop their children from eating in bed, but now doctors are also telling their patients the same thing — if they don’t want ants crawling into their ears.
Although it is common to find small bugs in ear canals, a local doctor yesterday said he recently found as many as 25 dead ants in the ears of a 16-year-old girl.
Before seeking medical help, the girl, who has a sweet tooth, had been suffering from ear pain for several months, said Hung Yaun-tsung (洪元宗), chief of the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at Taipei City Hospital.
Hung suspected that her habit of eating cookies and cakes in bed lured the ants into her ears, causing unbearable itching.
“She confided that she would pick her ears while eating snacks and later go to sleep without brushing away the crumbs,” the doctor said. “The ants might have found their way into her ears by following the cookie crumbs, and stayed put because there was enough food there to keep them alive.”
However, the ants he found were dead upon examination, possibly because the girl had dropped some oil into her ears to ease her discomfort, Hung said. Her inflamed eardrums improved after treatment and no ants were found in follow-up sessions.
Ear pain resulting from insect intrusion is common, said Hung, who sees patients with small cockroaches, mosquitoes and ants in their ears on a daily basis.
“But it’s the first time I’ve found so many ants in both ears,” he added.
He said sufferers can put a few drops of cooking oil into their ears to kill the bugs if immediate medical attention cannot be obtained.
“But remember not to scratch your ears, because it could push the bugs further into the ear canal,” he said.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS