The Council of Agriculture (COA) on Wednesday called a cross-agency meeting to discuss measures to prevent African swine fever (ASF) from entering Taiwan, as the disease continues to spread across China.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has advised that government agencies publish information about the viral disease to help protect public health and the nation’s hog-raising industry, National Security Council Secretary-General David Lee (李大維) said at the meeting.
The nation must also boost quarantine controls at its borders and implement cross-department cooperation to prevent the ASF virus from entering the country, Lee said, citing Tsai.
The meeting, the first of its kind in the nation, was held at a national security level, as ASF has now spread across five provinces in China since it was reported there earlier in the month, Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine Deputy Director-General Shih Tai-hua (施泰華) said.
The World Organisation for Animal Health has received reports of the epidemic from China’s Liaoning, Henan and Jiangsu provinces, where about 10,000 pigs have been culled, Shih said.
However, infected pigs in Henan had been transported from Heilongjiang Province, and those in Liaoning from Jilin Province, which means the virus has spread across five provinces in China, Shih said.
The bureau is to send health alerts via text messages to Taiwanese traveling to China, advising them not to go near pig farms there or to bring pork products back to Taiwan, he said.
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:
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