Sixty percent of the travelers in 14 Taiwanese tour groups to South Korea displayed symptoms of stomach flu, four of whom tested positive for norovirus, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday.
The CDC said it was told by the Tourism Bureau and several travel agencies that 14 tour groups traveling in South Korea had recently suffered from gastroenteritis, with at least 246 of the 412 travelers experiencing diarrhea, abdominal pain and vomiting and four having been confirmed with the norovirus infection.
Thirty-six specimens from 28 returning travelers with symptoms have been collected, of which four have been found with the presence of norovirus, 17 have tested negative and 15 are still being tested.
The CDC said South Korean health authorities had also confirmed that the 10 Taiwanese travelers who visited local hospitals during their trip tested positive for the norovirus.
The visitors started to develop symptoms three or four days after their arrival in South Korea, the disease control agency said. It added that it could not rule out local restaurants being the cause of the infection, and has therefore asked the travel agencies to change the travelers’ dining destinations.
South Korean health authorities have also been contacted for an investigation on the environment and the working staff of the local restaurants suspected of contamination, the CDC said.
The agency said that norovirus is highly contagious and a common cause of viral gastroenteritis in winter, and that outbreaks of norovirus infection were also frequently reported in developed countries.
The primary mode of transmission of norovirus is the fecal-oral route, either through direct contact with the infected or via contaminated food or water, the CDC said.
People infected with the virus start to develop symptoms of gastroenteritis within one to three days of infection, which lasts for between one and 10 days, depending on the health of the infected individual, it said.
The common symptoms include watery diarrhea and vomiting accompanied by headache, fever, abdominal cramps, stomach pain, nausea and body aches.
Practicing proper hand hygiene and eating only thoroughly cooked food are effective ways to prevent the infection, the agency said.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
A decision to describe a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement on Singapore’s Taiwan policy as “erroneous” was made because the city-state has its own “one China policy” and has not followed Beijing’s “one China principle,” Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Tien Chung-kwang (田中光) said yesterday. It has been a longstanding practice for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to speak on other countries’ behalf concerning Taiwan, Tien said. The latest example was a statement issued by the PRC after a meeting between Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on the sidelines of the APEC summit
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS