This boyish 27-year-old guy has the world’s heart in his hands.
We’re talking about Jungkook of BTS. He amassed millions of new followers in a single day with the launch of his new Instagram account.
And yet the personal account he opened Tuesday last week had no posts. By Wednesday morning, it had already surpassed 6.5 million followers. They were following just the name. Can anyone ever beat that?
The youngest (and most handsome?) A BTS member has confirmed that the Instagram profile was indeed his. He made the confirmation during a livestream on the new account.
He also explained via a follow-up Weverse Live broadcast that the name of the account, “mnijungkook,” is short for “my name is Jungkook.”
This number further grew to 7.7 million the next day.
Jungkook first launched a personal Instagram account in December 2021, which gained over 50 million followers. However, he deleted the account in 2023, saying he “wasn’t using it.”
His new account currently follows the official BTS Instagram and the individual accounts of fellow BTS members.
He completed his military service on 11 June 11. BTS is currently preparing for a full-group comeback, scheduled for spring 2026.
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The Philippine Heart Association (PHA), a nationwide organization of heart doctors (technically known as cardiologist), is seeing to it that part of every grown-up Filipino’s lifestyle is knowing how to administer the so-called “CPR” or cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
As they did last year, the PHA held this July a mass teaching of CPR to hundreds of high school students, teachers, firemen, barangay health workers, policemen, and barangay peace-keeping personnel locally known as “tanod.” The learners practized on dummies of the human upper torso.
The mass teaching was held at the covered basketball court of Nangka High School in Marikina in the morning of 17 July.
In the afternoon of the same day, the PHA held a quiz contest on basic cardiopulmonary knowledge among representatives of 15 high schools.
The CPR is basically the forceful and repeated quick pressing of the hands on the chest of a person because they have collapsed and their heart has stopped beating (which circulates the blood all over the body).
Those persons have suffered “cardiac arrest” and they have to be given CPR within four minutes upon their collapse if they are to survive at all. Their hearts have to be revived while waiting for an ambulance to arrive within a few minutes while the patient is awake. Asking someone to call an ambulance is the first thing a CPR giver should do.
The chest-pressing has to be done at a certain rate per minute, so CPR is a skill that has to be taught and trained for. But then even healthy high school students can learn it and do it successfully on a person under a cardiac arrest. Even girls and women can do it well.
There’ actually a law nicknamed “The Samboy Lim Effect” (yes, he’s the “Skywalker” of the Philippine Basketball Association) which requires high school students to learn how to give CPR.
Lim, in November 2014, collapsed from cardiac arrest in a PBA Legends game. Though he did not receive a CPR, he survived because one of his co-players rushed him in a car to a hospital just a few minutes after he collapsed. The doctors were able to revive him but he was never restored to normal.
He lost speech and physical movement. After some months in a hospital, he was taken care of at home by his family and visiting doctors. He lived until 2023 December.
The Law is actually Republic Act No. 10871, or the Basic Life Support Training in Schools Act. It was signed in 2016, requiring high school students to undergo CPR training before graduation.
The law aims to equip young people with the knowledge and skills to respond effectively to medical emergencies, potentially saving lives.
It was actually the basketball coach-politician Yeng Guiao who first proposed the law in Congress after Lim’s cardiac arrest and months of hospitalization. Guiao’s bill lapsed into a law in 2016, at the time he was no longer a congressman. But then Guiao is widely acknowledged for his work on it.
There’s another celebrity politician the PHA look up to in their advocacy for surviving heart ailments: actor-senator Lito Lapid.