Taipei Veterans General Hospital (TVGH) yesterday unveiled the nation’s first heavy ion therapy center, saying 2 percent of its treatment capacity would be reserved for socially disadvantaged people.
The center cost NT$4.5 billion (US$146.04 million), the hospital said.
The hospital launched its heavy particle cancer treatment center project in 2009, and began constructing the center in 2019, hospital superintendent Chen Wei-ming (陳威明) said.
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
With the help of a Japanese technical team, the hospital completed the center in a record 15 months, Chen said, adding that the installation and verification of equipment was completed five months afterward.
It is the 14th operating heavy ion therapy center in the world and began treating patients at noon yesterday.
There are many treatment methods for cancer such as surgery, chemotherapy, medication therapy, immunotherapy and radiation therapy, Chen said.
Heavy ion therapy is an advanced form of radiation therapy, he said.
It uses carbon ions which are 12 times heavier than protons and can deliver more radiation to tumors with high precision, causing more damage to cancerous cells, he said.
The therapy has a shorter treatment course, is painless and allows patients to return to their normal lives faster than other treatments, Chen said.
Many countries covered by the government’s New Southbound Policy have expressed an interest in the center, he said.
The Mayo Clinic in the US has sent experts to the hospital three times and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) last month, Chen said.
The hospital has also signed an MOU with the Taiwan Space Agency, because the center can assist in the radiation protection verification of space components, he said.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said the opening of the center also marks an important milestone in medical cooperation between Taiwan and Japan.
Previously, people in Taiwan who needed heavy ion therapy had to travel to Japan, but now they can receive treatment in Taiwan, while people in other countries can also visit the nation for treatment, she said.
The center is “the last piece of the puzzle” in Taiwan’s precision cancer radiation therapy, and hopefully medical centers nationwide would form a “cancer radiation therapy national team” to provide care to cancer patients and enhance Taiwan’s medical competitiveness globally, Tsai said.
She also thanked the companies that made donations to help build the center.
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