The Taipei City Government will offer free funerals for people who have donated their organs as part of a bid to encourage people to sign organ-donor cards, the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) reported yesterday.
The government passed the measure on holding free funeral for organ donors on Tuesday. A health ministry funeral subsidy will go to the deceased who have donated their heart, kidney, liver and pancreas, but the city government intends to extend it to also cover those who have donated corneas, bones and skin, the report said.
If the organ donor is a Taipei resident, the city government will hold a free-of-charge memorial service, issue a citation and publicly praise the deceased organ donor.
Taipei hopes that hospitals can put the city government in touch with family members of the deceased who have donated organs.
It will be left up to family members to decide if the deceased should be publicly praised for their act of kindness.
Like many other countries, Taiwan faces a severe shortage of donated organs because people traditionally believe one should be buried or cremated with the body intact.
According to the Taiwan Organ Registry Matching Center, 6,000 people are on the waiting list for organ transplants, but each year there are only about 100 donated organs, which come mostly from road accident victims and other deceased people.
The lack of donated organs has prompted hundreds of patients, mostly liver and kidney patients, to go to China each year for organ transplants.
The Department of Health discourages organ transplant trips to China because many of the organs transplanted in Chinese hospitals are allegedly harvested from executed prisoners.
TECH SECTOR: Nvidia Corp also announced its intent to build an overseas headquarters in Taiwan, with Taipei and New Taipei City each attempting to woo the US chipmaker The US-based Super Micro Computer Inc and Taiwan’s Guo Rui on Wednesday announced a joint venture to build a computation center powered only by renewable energy. After meeting with Supermicro founder Charles Liang (梁見後) and Guo Rui chairman Lin Po-wen (林博文), Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) instructed a cross-ministry panel to be established to help promote the government’s green energy policies and facilitate efforts to obtain land for the generation of green power, Executive Yuan spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) said. Cho thanked Liang for his company’s support of the government’s 2019 Action Plan for Welcoming Overseas Taiwanese Businesses to Return to Invest in
The unification of China and Taiwan is “non-negotiable,” China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) said yesterday in response to an article by a Chinese academic suggesting that Beijing would not set a timetable for the annexation of Taiwan in the next four years. Chinese international studies researcher Yan Xuetong (閻學通) at Beijing’s Tsinghua University wrote in an article published last week in Foreign Affairs that China’s focus for the next four years would be revitalizing the economy, not preparing a timetable to invade Taiwan. The TAO said that was only the personal opinion of an academic. The Chinese Communist Party has since 1949 committed
The lowest temperature in a low-lying area recorded early yesterday morning was in Miaoli County’s Gongguan Township (公館), at 6.8°C, due to a strong cold air mass and the effect of radiative cooling, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. In other areas, Chiayi’s East District (東區) recorded a low of 8.2°C and Yunlin County’s Huwei Township (虎尾) recorded 8.5°C, CWA data showed. The cold air mass was at its strongest from Saturday night to the early hours of yesterday. It brought temperatures down to 9°C to 11°C in areas across the nation and the outlying Kinmen and Lienchiang (Matsu) counties,
A new board game set against the backdrop of armed conflict around Taiwan is to be released next month, amid renewed threats from Beijing, inviting players to participate in an imaginary Chinese invasion 20 years from now. China has ramped up military activity close to Taiwan in the past few years, including massing naval forces around the nation. The game, titled 2045, tasks players with navigating the troubles of war using colorful action cards and role-playing as characters involved in operations 10 days before a fictional Chinese invasion of Taiwan. That includes members of the armed forces, Chinese sleeper agents and pro-China politicians
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