The discovery of dangerous levels of toxic cadmium in rice sold in the southern city of Guangzhou, the latest in a series of food scandals, has piled more pressure on China to clean up its food chain – possibly at the expense of Mao Zedong’s cherished goal of self-sufficiency. The ruling Communist Party has long [...]

The H7N9 virus appears under control in China largely through restrictions at bird markets, but it caused some $6.5 billion in losses, United Nations experts said Tuesday. The virus infected at least 130 people in China since March, with 36 deaths, but no cases have been detected since early May, China’s health minister said. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/22/world/asia/china-new-bird-flu-virus-is-controlled-officials-say.html?_r=1&

Zhang Yimou, the celebrated film director and arranger of the 2008 Summer Olympics’ opening ceremony in Beijing, was accused last week of being the latest high-profile violator of China’s one-child policy. The People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, alleged that Zhang had fathered seven children with four different women. The news has ignited an angry [...]

The H7N9 virus appears to have been brought under control in China largely due to restrictions at bird markets, but caused some $6.5 billion in losses to the economy, UN experts said on Tuesday. Health authorities worldwide must be on the lookout to detect the virus, the experts said, which could still develop the ability [...]

No new human cases of the H7N9 virus have been recorded in China for a week, national health authorities said, for the first time since the outbreak began in March. One previously infected patient died in the week beginning May 13, the National Health and Family Planning Commission said in a statement late Monday, taking [...]

A hospital in Tokyo said Monday that it stands ready to conduct preventive mastectomies and that several women have undergone the operation there in the past after developing cancer in one breast. St. Luke’s International Hospital said its ethics committee approved preventive mastectomy procedures in July 2011, allowing women who tested positive in genetic screening [...]

It is impossible to predict the evolution of China’s human H7N9 bird flu outbreak as researchers are still trying to understand the source of human transmission, the head of the World Health Organization said Monday. According to the latest official data, H7N9 avian influenza has infected 130 people in China, and killed 35, since it [...]

When a sick Indonesian baby died after 10 hospitals in Jakarta turned her family away in February, critics blamed a pilot health insurance scheme that had overwhelmed the city’s public hospitals. The programme, introduced in November, gave health insurance to around 5mn people in Jakarta categorised as poor. Long queues quickly formed at already stretched [...]

China’s human H7N9 bird flu outbreak has cost the country’s poultry industry more than 400 billion yuan ($65 billion) as consumers shun chicken, government officials said, according to state media. The sector has been losing an average of one billion yuan a day since the end of March, the Beijing Times said on Monday, citing [...]

Australia seized a record 23 tonnes of illicit drugs in 2011-2012 with arrests at a 10-year high, data showed on Monday, as officials warned the country had become a key target for traffickers. The annual Australian Crime Commission report showed the amount caught was up 154 percent on the previous year, boosted by a single [...]

When a sick Indonesian baby died after 10 hospitals in Jakarta turned her family away in February, critics blamed a pilot health insurance scheme that had overwhelmed the city’s public hospitals. The programme, introduced in November, gave health insurance to around 5 million people in Jakarta categorised as poor. Long queues quickly formed at already [...]

China fast-tracking sign offs on Kiwi meat plants is why tens of millions of dollars of meat is being blocked at the country’s border, says prime minister John Key. It emerged two weeks ago all meat exports to China had been blocked from entering the country since the last week of April. Some industry sources [...]

Four more people in China have died from a new strain of bird flu, bringing the death toll from the H7N9 virus to 36 from 131 confirmed cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. The United Nations health agency said the four deaths were from cases that had already been identified in laboratories. [...]

Australia reported its first ever case of the deadly bat-borne lyssavirus in a horse Friday, warning that transmission to humans was possible as it quarantined a property. Biosecurity Queensland said the horse was euthanised last week after falling ill with what was initially suspected to be infection with another deadly virus, Hendra, which has killed [...]

China has begun a crackdown on the sales of fake, diseased and tainted meat products after a series of scandals that have further dented public confidence in the food industry, the official Xinhua news agency said on Thursday. It said the State Council, China’s cabinet, recently ordered local government departments to step up checks on [...]

Indian government announced that they are developing a new low-cost vaccine to treat diarrhea, one the major causes of childhood deaths across developing countries. The Indian manufacturer of the new rotavirus vaccine said they will price each vaccine for $1, which is comparatively much less than the other vaccines available in the market. Around half [...]

Malaysia has the highest incidence of end-stage renal failure attributed to diabetes THE health ministry has urged the public to take care of their kidneys as the number of patients suffering from kidney disease is on the rise. Datuk Dr Azmi Shapie, the former director of the health ministry’s medical development division, said: “Kidney problems [...]

The virus has already killed her mother, and Kelly Gu’s father lies critically ill with H7N9 bird flu in a Shanghai hospital bed – the only couple both infected in China’s outbreak of the disease. As her mother lay dying, Gu was urgently summoned back to Shanghai from her doctoral studies in chemistry in France, [...]

Doctors carried out life-saving surgery Wednesday on an Indian baby suffering from a rare disorder that caused her head to swell to nearly double its size, in a case that aroused sympathy worldwide. AFP was given access to film the surgery on 15-month-old Roona Begum, during which doctors used a surgical drill to pierce her [...]

The Indian government has announced the development of new low-cost vaccine referred to as Rotavac against rotavirus, a diarrhea causative agent leading to a number of childhood deaths in the developing world. The new rotavirus vaccine is expected to be made available at a cost of around $1 per dose, allowing poor countries to easily [...]

Authorities in the south central province of Ninh Thuan have declared that the bird flu outbreak which took place among swiftlets raised for profitable nests at a local farm is over. Tran Quoc Nam, a spokesman for the local government, told the press Monday no dead swiftlets have been found at Thanh Binh Farm in [...]

Sight-threatening conditions such as diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration are becoming a growing concern. Find out more about such problems during the upcoming Retinal Diseases Awareness Week which kicks off this Saturday. THEY say that the eyes are the mirror of the soul. Unfortunately, sight-threatening conditions such as retinal diseases are becoming a growing [...]

Three more people have died in China from the new strain of H7N9 bird flu virus, raising the death toll to 35 while the total number of infections rose to 130, state media said on Monday. Without giving details of the deaths, Xinhua news agency said a new case of the H7N9, described by the [...]

Eleven people in Singapore have been investigated for the avian flu virus H7N9 and another 24 for novel coronavirus to date. But none was positive. Health minister Gan Kim Yong, who revealed this in Parliament on Monday, said that so long as there is no sustained human-to-human transmission of the two diseases, the risk of [...]

Southwestern China’s Tibet Autonomous Region has reported an outbreak of the highly contagious H5N1 bird flu virus in poultry, the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) announced on Monday. Thirty-five chickens at a farm in a village in Mainling County of Nyingchi Prefecture showed symptoms of the suspected avian flu and died last Tuesday, according to the [...]

The health ministry has advised the public not to panic over the recent outbreak of Influenza A (H7N9) in China because no cases have been detected here. Director-general Datuk Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, who disclosed this, said the situation in China was also improving with fewer cases reported. “What’s important is that WHO (World Health [...]

Indonesia could end up with a bird flu outbreak similar to that in China because the two countries share similar methods of poultry husbandry, an expert warned over the weekend. I Wayan Teguh Wibawan, who researches animal health at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), said at a seminar on Saturday that Indonesian farmers, like [...]

China’s local health organs have been instructed to step up flu monitoring as part of the country’s efforts to fight H7N9 flu, according to a government document issued Friday. The instruction features an upgraded plan for H7N9 flu prevention and control, which was issued by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, to replace a [...]

The H7N9 bird flu killed one person in Shanghai Friday, local health authorities said Saturday, bringing the nationwide death toll to 33. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Jiang died Friday evening in a local hospital one month after her infection was confirmed, the Shanghai Municipal Health and Family Planning Commission announced. As of 5 p.m. Saturday, [...]

Public health officials worldwide are watching a new type of avian influenza that has killed nearly a quarterof the 131 people its has sickened in China. Improved surveillance is giving infectious disease experts hope of being able to answer some particularly vexing questions about the H7N9 strain, which was first identified in March: ? In [...]

Cambodia is on track to become one of the few countries in the world to successfully reverse its HIV epidemic and may eliminate new infections by 2020, the World Health Organization said Friday. The Southeast Asian nation has reduced its HIV prevalence rate from a 1998 peak of 1.7 percent among people aged 15-49 to [...]

China reported one more death from a new strain of bird flu on Thursday, bringing the death toll to 32, with the number of infections staying at 129, the official Xinhua news agency said. A 56-year-old man died in the central province of Henan, two weeks after his infection was confirmed, Xinhua cited a statement [...]

China and five Southeast Asian nations vowed Thursday to boost cooperation in the fight against illegal drugs, which they warned posed a “significant threat” to the region. The pledge came at the end of a meeting of ministers or representatives from Cambodia, China, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam in the Myanmar capital Naypyidaw. “Consumption and [...]

African Press Organisation (APO) – Today, Chinese and African leaders will come together at the 4th International Roundtable on China-Africa Health Cooperation to explore new partnerships to address some of the most pressing health challenges facing Africa and strengthen an innovative health partnership based on south-south cooperation. This year’s roundtable is the first to take [...]

There is an old African proverb: “If you want to walk fast, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.” That was the guiding principle behind the International Roundtable on China-Africa Health Cooperation this week in Gaborone, the capital of Botswana. This is the fourth such annual conference – and the first [...]

IN A STRANGE TWIST of evolution, the influenza virus seems to have endless capability to reinvent itself, infecting waterfowl, swine and humans over and over again with great power and destructive force. A periodic reassortment of its genes gives rise to new variants that have not been seen before. Each time, the new variant poses [...]

Scientists said Wednesday that flu infections were rising among pigs raised for slaughter on farms in south and southeastern China, also plagued by bird flu. And the risk of spillover to humans was “constant or growing”, according to one of the authors of a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Pigs are [...]

Human rights and press freedom are crucial if China is to achieve its stated Aids prevention goals, particularly when it comes to safeguarding women and children, a leading Aids specialist has said. According to US-based dissident doctor Wan Yanhai, Aids prevention is intimately bound up with human rights and the empowerment of women, and China [...]

Singapore’s dengue cases are set to surge to a record this year, prompting the government to break into homes that could be breeding grounds for mosquitoes that transmit the disease. Inspectors have broken into three homes suspected of housing mosquitoes since the start of the year, the National Environment Agency said today. They cut the [...]

Four more people in China have died from a new strain of bird flu, bringing to 31 the number of deaths from the mysterious H7N9 virus, with the number of infections rising by two to 129, according to Chinese health authorities. Among the deaths, two occurred in the eastern province of Jiangsu; one was from [...]

Just how unsafe is food in China? Over the past three months, Chinese police have arrested more than 900 people for selling fake or tainted meat, including a criminal ring that processed meat from rat and fox and sold it as mutton. Public outrage had hardly died down when another food scandal broke out on [...]

Doctors are warning that a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea could be more deadly than Aids, and are urging members of US Congress to spend $54 million for the development of a drug that would fight it. “This might be a lot worse than Aids in the short run because the bacteria is more aggressive and [...]

The UN World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are already working with samples of the new H7N9 bird flu virus in China to make a vaccine, if one is needed. The following are some key facts about vaccines, drugs and avian influenza: * The WHO and CDC prepare samples [...]

And you thought Europeans had problems with their horse meat scandals. In China, consumers have to worry about getting served rat meat for dinner. That’s the latest frightening food-safety scare from China, where the government is determined to show weary Chinese consumers the system can protect them from hazardous products. China’s Ministry of Public Security [...]

Shanghai authorities are testing mislabelled mutton from a wholesaler a government website said supplies a chain of hot pot restaurants run by US fast food firm Yum Brands Inc, the latest safety scare to taint China’s food industry. Acting on a tip, Shanghai food safety inspectors and police raided a wholesale market on Friday and [...]

An almost 20-year-old case of a Beijing student left paralysed after allegedly being poisoned was back in the spotlight in Chinese state media Monday after a petition was posted on the White House website. Zhu Ling suffered severe brain damage after, according to the petitioners, she was poisoned with thallium by her roommate Sun Wei [...]

Poultry workers moving to and from wet markets and farms may be responsible for the spread of the deadly H7N9 virus in China, says a virologist who’s working with the World Health Organization to investigate the outbreak. University of Hong Kong clinical virologist Malik Peiris told CNN the closure of Shanghai’s poultry markets on April [...]

First it was tainted baby food and toys with lead paint. Now China is dealing with a meat scandal that involves passing rat meat off as lamb. The Ministry of Public Safety announced recently that police have arrested hundreds of people involved in a scheme to sell a mixture of rat, mink and fox meat [...]

Shanghai authorities are cracking down on sales of mutton after police busted a crime ring selling rat, fox and mink as the meat, the official Xinhua News Agency reported today. City police and officials from the food safety division raided a market in Minhang district on May 3 after a tip-off, and seized large quantities [...]

The new H7N9 bird flu strain has been found to be a mixture of genes from four flu strains found in birds even as the first patient with severe symptoms of the deadly disease has made a complete recovery. Since it was first identified on March 30, 127 cases have been detected in 10 provincial [...]