The Formosa Cancer Foundation on Tuesday launched a Web site for cancer patients to borrow wigs online, after it found that transportation and other considerations prevented many people from visiting its centers in person.
In addition to providing cancer patients with support in their treatment and care, the foundation’s centers in Taipei and Kaohsiung offer a wig loan service, it said.
To give cancer patients ample time to select and try on the wigs, the centers take appointments for the service by telephone, it said.
Photo: CNA
However, the foundation discovered that last year, about 30 percent of people were unable to keep their appointments, it said.
The patients’ poor health, medical needs, professional or caregiving responsibilities, as well as the weather were among the reasons for the missed appointments, the foundation said.
Meanwhile, other patients wanted to borrow a wig, but were unable to visit the centers in person due to factors including distance, a lack of transportation or inconvenient transportation, and a lack of friends or relatives to accompany them, it said.
As a result, the foundation created the wig.canceraway.org.tw Web site, which allows cancer patients to borrow the wig they prefer without leaving their homes, in just five steps, it said.
The online platform offers more than 100 wigs in more than 20 styles, the foundation said.
Each medical-grade wig uses about five to eight bundles of hair and costs NT$3,500 to make, foundation chief executive officer Lai Gi-ming (賴基銘) said, urging people to contribute to the foundation’s hair donation and fundraising campaigns.
Women make up about 97 percent of the users of the foundation’s wig loan service, he said.
In terms of age groups, about 35 percent of people who borrow wigs from the foundation are aged 41 to 50, while about 20 percent are aged 31 to 40, he said.
For 38 consecutive years, cancer has ranked first among the top 10 causes of death in Taiwan, the foundation said.
A total of 111,684 people were diagnosed with cancer in 2017, the foundation said, citing the Health Promotion Administration’s cancer registry data.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the