The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday confirmed six new indigenous dengue fever cases in people who had visited vegetable farms or live near a farm.
Three of the patients — two women and one man — visited a vegetable farm called Happy Farm (開心農場) in Taichung’s Dali District (大里) between Aug. 11 and Wednesday last week before showing dengue fever symptoms, the CDC said.
Two of the three are hospitalized, while the other has been instructed to rest at home, it said.
Another patient, who had also visited the farm, was on Monday confirmed to have contracted dengue fever, so the four patients are being treated as a cluster case, the CDC said.
The three others — two men and one woman — are from New Taipei City’s Sinjhuang District (新莊) and started showing dengue fever symptoms over the weekend, it said.
Two of them are hospitalized and one is resting at home, the CDC said.
Two of them, from the district’s Hsisheng (西盛) and Siwei (四維) boroughs, had visited an organic vegetable farm in Cyonglin Borough (瓊林) before falling ill, while the third lives close to the farm, so the CDC has included them in a cluster case that was confirmed in Cyonglin earlier this year.
A total of 28 indigenous dengue fever cases have been confirmed this year, with 16 cases in Cyonglin Borough, six in Taichung, two each in Taipei and Chiayi County, and one each in Taoyuan and Kaohsiung.
Its inspectors found more than 300 containers filled with standing water at or around Happy Farm, 46 of which were found to contain mosquito larvae, the CDC said.
The farm has been temporarily closed for disinfection, it said.
The CDC said it has asked local health bureaus to follow its urban farm management guidelines for preventing dengue fever, instruct the public not to keep standing water, and to enhance patrols and mosquito controls at farms.
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