In preparation for back-to-school season, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday urged parents and teachers to educate children about the need to frequently wash their hands in order to avoid infection from the enterovirus.
The CDC said peak enterovirus season typically extends from April to September, but that as children go back to school, they are more at risk of spreading the disease to each other than during the summer vacation.
There have been 15 severe cases of enterovirus infection in the country so far this year, which is lower than previous years because enterovirus type 71 (EV71), the main cause of severe enterovirus, has been kept under control.
The CDC warned against complacency, saying that based on the data it has gathered so far, the number of cases could rise as children go back to school.
“About one to two weeks after children go back to school, there would be another peak [of enterovirus infections],” CDC deputy director Chou Jih-haw (周志浩) said.
Since enterovirus mainly affects young children, especially those under the age of five, and mainly travels by the fecal-oral route and the respiratory system, it is important for children to wash their hands frequently, especially before meals, he said.
In other news, the CDC said that those who have been diagnosed with dengue fever should take precautions against being infected with a secondary type of dengue virus to avoid the fatal dengue hemorrhagic fever.
CDC officials said they were worried that if the recent wave of dengue fever was not kept under control, more cases of dengue hemorrhagic fever could occur.
The CDC recently reported the country’s first death from dengue hemorrhagic fever. The woman died on Wednesday after being infected with one type of dengue fever earlier this month, followed by another type shortly afterwards.
Health officials advised households to keep surrounding areas dry to prevent the proliferation of mosquitoes that carry the dengue virus.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching