Ten more blood samples taken from ferret-badgers in the nation’s eight rabies-affected counties and cities sent to the central testing center were confirmed infected with rabies on Thursday, the Central Epidemic Command Center for rabies said yesterday, emphasizing that ferret-badgers are still the main species affected by the virus.
As of Thursday, 62 out of 194 wildlife carnivore samples had tested positive for rabies, all of which were from ferret-badgers, the center said.
The command center held its fourth meeting on the rabies situation yesterday, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Chang Feng-yee (張峰義) said, adding that the meeting was presided over by Vice Premier Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國).
The meeting asked the Council of Agriculture to continue its supervision of local authorities over the implementation of vaccination programs targeting cats and dogs in high-risk areas, and to speed up the risk assessment and analysis of the feasibility of distributing oral vaccines in the mountains.
“The center has also directed the Ministry of the Interior to advise local governments to further promote prevention and control of rabies through the neighborhood administrative system” to build awareness in each household, Chang said.
“Based on experiences in foreign countries, children under 15 and elderly people are at a higher risk of rabies infection,” Chang said. “Little children tend to ignore scratches and bites, while elderly people living alone often do not pay enough attention to bites or wounds. This rules out early treatment, which can prevent rabies [from developing].”
CDC Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥) also cautioned people who have been evaluated to receive post-exposure rabies vaccines that “the rabies vaccine, which consists of five shots in total, has to be administered according to the schedule.”
“Falling short of completing the whole regimen or interrupting the schedule might result in dire consequences,” Chuang said.
Chuang added that there are now 60 hospitals in the nation, with at least one in each county or city, that have stocks of rabies vaccines for humans.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
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Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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