Children at risk of stomach inflammation, doctor warns
By Ou Su-mei and Jake Chung / Staff reporter, with staff writer
People should pay more attention to food safety during family gatherings over the Lunar New Year holiday, the Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital’s Taichung branch said on Tuesday, referring to an increase in cases of gastroenteritis.
This year, the number of children treated at the hospital for gastroenteritis was about as high as the number of those treated for respiratory tract infections, the hospital’s pediatric department director Lee Min-chun (李敏駿) said.
This was alarming, as respiratory tract infections in the past few years comprised up to 60 percent of all cases involving children, he said.