Results tagged “health”

Since up until now, we've only seen the third case of serious swine flu emerged in Shanghai, you may well be wondering, “how bad could all this hullabaloo get anyway?"

Xinjiang has been through a lot of political and social trauma in the last couple of months, what with the riots in July, syringe attacks in September, the executions that followed, continuous H1N1 scares, and an internet blackout throughout the province.

If you've somehow avoided the news all weekend, the United States just passed a bill on healthcare reform, which is the first step in a long line towards actual change. Less well known (probably because of the lack of flashy partisan politics) is China's attempt to reform it's own healthcare system, which is a daunting task in its own way.

• Growing Chinese Military Creates Uncertainty: U.S. [Reuters] "The U.S. military needs better dialogue with China to avoid "mistakes and miscalculations" given an unprecedented military expansion stoking uncertainty in the region, top U.S. defense officials said Wednesday."
• Why China Isn't Ready to Lead [The Wall Street Journal] "Chinese decision makers need to realize that global economic leadership does not stem only from a large cash hoard. In the long run, a credible respect for property rights and unbiased contract enforcement will draw a larger share of global investors into the Chinese economic sphere."
• Gang crackdown, lurid mob trials transfix China [Associated Press] "After she refused a corrupt cop's demand that she turn her teahouse into an illegal casino, three thugs beat Chen Yanling with electric batons, sending her to the hospital for nearly a month. Chen is now getting some vicarious revenge, joining the throngs outside a courthouse where modern-day China's biggest, most lurid mob trials are under way. The trials are exposing sordid, deep-seated connections between organized crime and corrupt officials and police in the central mega-city of Chongqing, once known as Chungking."

Just in time for the national day celebration, Beijing announced that it has begun a countrywide swine flu vaccination campaign. Shots were administered to thousands of students participating in the 60th anniversary parade and will be given to 65 million citizens by the end of the year, with priority placed on those in public service and the infirm. China is now the first country to implement such a campaign against swine flu: given the drastic increase in swine flue cases, we hope the effort is enough.

Traditional Chinese Medicine experts are suggesting that people sleep one extra hour each day during hot weather periods, according to Shanghai Daily. Generally, sleeping between midnight and 4am is best, since the organs need that time to rest, and an one hour nap at noon can decrease the incidence of cardiovascular diseases in seniors. Personally, we'd love to take that allotted one hour nap time (especially considering the temperatures these days)... unfortunately, noon's about the time that the endless construction around the city - and our building - starts. Do TCM practitioners have any tips for sleeping through drilling noises so loud they shake our apartments?

In a modern day version of Sophie's Choice, an American couple must leave their newly adopted Chinese daughter or risk losing their jobs in the U.S. should they remain with their daughter.

Thousands of people in Qinghai province have been placed under quarantine after two men died and 11 others were confirmed infected with pneumonic plague. The first victim, a 32-year-old herdsman in Ziketan, died over the weekend. His 37-year-old neighbor was the second casualty. Pneumonic plague, which can be spread through coughing, is caused by the same bacteria that occurs in bubonic plague and considered even more dangerous since it could kill 24 hours after infection. The Qinghai health bureau has now stated that anyone who has visited Ziketan and the surrounding areas since July 16 needs to seek treatment immediately if they've developed a fever or a cough. Source: Bloomberg

We just read an article about a woman who sued a boob job clinic after they tried over fifty fruitless times in the last year to enlarge her breasts. On the basis of this deplorable record, Ms. Zhao decide to sue the clinic, and she won. The general rule in Chinese law is 1+1 compensation — meaning that if you spend 4800RMB, as Ms. Zhao did, that you get 9600 RMB as compensation. For Ms. Zhao, all's well that ends well, but the more we searched for similar stories, the more we got the feeling that this was just the very sensitive tip of a dark and sinister iceberg of fraudulence.

That the Cantonese will eat anything that has legs apart from tables is a time-tested truth. And they will travel loooong distances and search high and low for places where they can put weird things into their mouth. Of course it always helps if you've heard from someone who's heard from someone who's heard from someone else about the marvelous nutritious and alimentary effects of this weird stuff that you're about to eat.

Has KFC been substituting cod fish in its food with some other type of species? According to Xinmin, an insider at the fast food establishment has alleged that it uses a species of fish called "Dragon Cod" (龙鳕鱼) instead.

Yes, we're sick of the scaremongering, paranoia and misinformation. While we're already cringing every time someone sneezes in the office or metro, we've realized what real paranoia is after spending the weekend in Hong Kong: doormats being disinfected every half hour, people talking through masks, masks being sold at every convenient store and an entire hotel being put under quarantine.

So how effective are China's emergency provisions against contracting swine flu? We're not sure right now! While news reports are coming out saying that, according to the World Health Organization's representative, authorities are investigating several suspected human cases in the country, that doesn't mean there IS swine flu here. It's just that some people that have come in contact with certain swine flu risky situations are now being checked out. In fact, WHO told the public it's not really "probable" that swine flu's hit the country yet... despite what your twitter feeds might say. Hmmm... maybe there was some logic to accusing twitter of being a panic monger after all. (thanks to @RodrigoMX and @doubleleaf for links)

The next big epidemic is here and this time around it didn't come out of China! Swine flu, a respiratory disease in pigs, has somehow spread to humans - infecting a total of 20 people in the U.S. so far and allegedly killing more than 103 in Mexico!

You know how at real Chinese restaurants all over town, the waiters always look at you funny when you ask for a glass of ice water because locals normally drink tea water about the temperature of the surface of the sun? Well you can laugh in their smug "Oh these foreigners and their addiction to cold drinks" faces - because now there's studies saying that hot tea, tea over the temperature of 70C, has been linked to oesophageal cancer!

By Richard Yu

China's Health Minister, Chen Zhu, has cautioned medical workers to quit smoking, in order to “set a good example for their patients and others who look up to them,” according to China Daily. About 320 million people are smokers right now, and growing rates of lung cancer and emphysema have become a major health concern. But without laws, taxes and other regulations in place, we can't help but think Mr. Chen won't have much luck seeing an end to smoking doctors. After all, it's not like they haven't been trying to get them to quit for years already.

Hong Kong is hinting that the Chinese mainland might be covering up a new outbreak of bird flu, after a number of dead fowl were found on Lantau Island. So far, 17 dead birds have washed up on Lantau's beaches in recent days, three of which had tested positive for the H5N1 virus.

• China will start providing two imported HIV drugs, Viread and Kaletra, to patients who have started developing resistance to cheaper, domestic alternatives. This means that nine of 20 drugs to combat AIDS are now available to patients in China.
• The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has condemned China's deportation of a musician from Cape Town, South Africa, who was ordered to leave China within 48 hours when health authorities found she was HIV-positive. Apparently, the woman was not even informed or counselled about her HIV test.
• Health authorities in Henan province claim that significant improvements have been made in controlling HIV/AIDS and that death rates there are "closer to the normal mortality rate and lower than the national average". According to them, Zhumadian, one of the cities hit by illegal blood sales in the 1990s, has seen death rates more than halved to 5 percent in the past six years.

After a two year old girl in Shanxi and a 27 year old woman in Shandong province succumbed earlier to the H5N1 virus, a 16 year old boy in Hunan province has become the third fatality recorded within a month. Chinese Health Minister Chen Zhu has called for health departments across the nation to pay "great attention" to the situation now that tens of millions of people are travelling home for the Chinese New Year.

Inspectors testing cream cakes sold in bakeries around town for melamine did not find the kidney stone-causing agent but they did find high levels of bacteria present in the cakes, and no, they're not of the good kind. According to Shanghai Daily:

   

Advertising Agency: Euro RSCG Life, Shanghai, China

Too much of a good thing, as they say, is bad. China is supposed to have the world's highest rate of antibiotics abuse and the problem, apart from killing an estimated 80,000 a year, is leading to an increased resistance of bacteria to drugs, resulting in a rising number of recessive syphilis cases, among others. An ambitious two-year project has now been launched to train over 30,000 medical staff across China in the responsible use of antibiotics.

Last week a 19 year old girl in Beijing died of bird flu (avian flu) in China's first reported case in about a year. Beijing Notebook wrote a list of tips for preventing infection by bird flu based on a distribution list from a doctor of the German Embassy in Beijing. Go to www.Beijing.diplo.de for a Chinese translation.

This warning may have come a little too late for some of you but the story needs to go out anyhow. The dog you see on the right, Addie, which belongs to Ryan McLaughlin (who also writes LostLaowai and CNet Asia's The Tech Dynasty) has just died from contact with aflatoxin-contaminated Optima dog food. Aflatoxicity leads to rapid liver failure and kills 80% of all dogs afflicted with it.

• 50 year old Shen Zhengjuan, director of the state-owned assets administration, or SASAC, jumped to her death from her apartment in Shanghai’s Huangpu District on the last day of 2008. Caijing Online speculates her suicide may have to do with the corruption scandal of former mayor Chen Liangyu. More here and here. (Update: The Huangpu District has issued a statement to state that Shen was not corrupt and was "a person of decency" and "an official who showed true conviction to her job.")
• Approximately 80% of college students in Shanghai are willing to lower salary expectations for their first jobs, with 2% saying they would even consider a job that paid a monthly salary of under RMB1,000.
• Intestinal washes are now becoming increasingly popular in Shanghai as a result of the all the recent food scandals. One hospital reports as many as 200 customers a month.

Melissa Chan of Al Jazeera reports from Beijing of the discrimination that Hepatitis B carriers in China have to deal with — in school and at the workplace. Most of this discrimination, of course, is rooted in the widespread ignorance about the virus throughout society, and results in Hep B carriers being shunned in the same way as HIV/AIDS carriers are shunned in China.

Shanghai-based Canadian documentary photographer Ryan Pyle informs us:

It appears that Li Guoxing, the first recipient of a face transplant surgery in China as been confirmed dead. Li Guoxing received a face transplant surgery in 2006 from surgeon Guo Shuzhong in Xi'an, China. If you can remember Mr. Li, 30 years old when he had the surgery, had is face ripped off by a bear while hunting in rural Yunnan province where he lived in a small village community. Mr. Li's death, it has been said, was due to an infection because he wasn't taking prescribed immune-system drugs properly. Another report says he was favoring herbal medicines instead. No final report on the death will be available because Mr. Li has been buried for several months now, and no autopsy was completed.

Continue reading "China's first face transplant recipient dead"

Finally some good news that will make anyone in China rest assured that the food on our table is safe. The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ) continues to be busy at work ensuring food safety for us all. After banning soy sauce and wasabi imported from three Japanese producers found to be tainted with toluene and ethyl acetate last month, AQSIQ has now withheld about 312 tonnes of Irish pork across the country, on global concerns that pork from Ireland contain potentially harmful levels of the cancer-causing agent dioxin. Even as many other countries are starting to ban Irish pork, this latest move by AQSIQ will hurt the Irish pork industry big time as China is a HUGE pork-consuming nation. Between September and now, China imported 2,047 tonnes of pork from Ireland.

Experts have introduced a new version of eye exercises for Chinese students that are said to combine Traditional Chinese Medicine techniques with massage and application of pressure to eye-related acu-points. If the old eye exercises were not able to combat the high incidence of myopia among Chinese students as this CCTV report seems to suggest, then we think the new exercises will just be as useless as the old ones.