From Wednesday next week, overseas workers diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB) will not have to be deported if their employers agree to assist with their treatment and workers agree to join the DOTS (directly observed treatment, short-course) program, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday.
The existing regulation on overseas workers with infectious diseases demands the termination of their employment permit.
The CDC said the communicable diseases listed includes TB, tuberculous pleurisy, HIV infection and Hansen’s disease (also known as leprosy).
The centers said that an average of 12,000 Taiwanese and 260 overseas workers test positive for TB annually, with most overseas people having been infected in their home countries.
When asked whether a TB-infected foreign worker would still face deportation if his or her employer refused to help, CDC Deputy Director-General Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said he believes most employers would be willing to help to avoid the costs of re-hiring staff.
“Two weeks of medication is generally enough to cancel the transmissibility of TB,” Chou said, adding that the effectiveness of the therapy has made the original restriction unnecessary.
However, Chou said people suffering multidrug-resistant TB, which requires a longer period of treatment, would be ineligible to stay in the country under the new amendment.
In March next year, employers will be able to send employee medical reports directly to the health bureaus, without needing to go via hospitals.
The CDC said this will streamline the process for the employers of 99 percent of foreign workers receiving health exams annually.
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
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