Health care policy and administration

While the Kingdom’s frequently criticized hospitals and doctors need to upgrade their services and skills, it is incorrect to label most Cambodian doctors “bad,” Prime Minister Hun Sen said yesterday. ...

Following consternation this week over the government’s decision to cease HIV testing in Peam village, health authorities released a statement yesterday seeking to ally any fears of an outbreak. ...

The Interior Ministry yesterday called for Beijing’s cooperation in tackling a ring of Chinese methamphetamine traffickers operating in Cambodia, one day after an annual Interior Ministry report announced that the number of drug busts in 2015 had more than doubled compared to 2014. ...

The Health Ministry is planning no further HIV tests in Kandal province’s Peam village, where a disproportionate cluster of infections has been discovered, despite two-thirds of the village still remaining untested. ...

The Ministry of Health has appealed to the public to protect itself from the H1N1 swine flu virus in a video posted on Facebook yesterday. ...

Testing on anxious villagers began in earnest yesterday as Health Ministry officials arrived in Peam, the Kandal province village recently discovered to have 14 confirmed HIV diagnoses. ...

The Medical Council of Cambodia and the Ministry of Health are working on a draft law that would force malpractice complaints to go through the council before they make it to a courtroom, an MCC official said yesterday. ...

An international health NGO has launched a new “crowd-sourcing” surveillance system to be used by the government in monitoring infectious diseases. ...

A study of the Kingdom’s district health system has found it “unable to manage” non-communicable diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, which are estimated to be responsible for more than half of adult deaths.    ...

Amid fears that the Zika virus could jump to Southeast Asia after its rapid spread through South America, the Cambodian Ministry of Health has asked citizens to take precautions to avoid mosquito bites. In a press release sent Friday, the ministry urged people to wear ...

A farm in Kompong Thom province that supplies Thai agro-industry giant Charoen Pokphand (CP) dumped the carcasses of 11,500 diseased chickens into an irrigation canal on Sunday, poisoning the waterway and endangering local livestock, according to officials. ...

A disease expert in Cambodia said on Friday that although the Zika virus—which has recently been linked to birth defects and paralysis in South America—had circulated in Cambodia in the past, there had been no reported cases of the virus here for three years, though ...

The Kingdom’s first clinical skills and simulation laboratories were inaugurated yesterday at the University of Health Sciences in Phnom Penh along with computerised exam rooms – part of the public university’s strategic four-year plan launched in 2014. ...

As part of a long-planned project to overhaul the country’s social security system, Prime Minister Hun Sen signed into law yesterday a sub-decree effectively granting health insurance to hundreds of thousands of Cambodian workers. ...

More than 600 villages, home to more than half a million people, have been declared “open-defecation free” as a result of a major program aimed at boosting the number of Cambodians who have access to hygienic toilets, according to Plan International. ...

National Police and National Military Police have been ordered by the Health Ministry to inspect the licenses of all private ambulances, which are often seen fighting for business at the scene of traffic accidents before charging exorbitant prices for their services. ...

More than 1,300 unlicensed medical clinics were shut down in 2015 and the remaining 900 will be closed in 2016, Health Minister Mam Bunheng said on Tuesday, ostensibly putting an end to lax medical standards that have allowed for scandals such as the mass HIV ...

Cambodia has reported 15,015 dengue fever cases in the first 50 weeks of this year, a more than 300 percent rise from the 3,611 cases over the same period last year, according to figures released yesterday.  ...

The Ministry of Heath on Monday ordered pharmacies to halt the sale of unapproved diet pill Mazeta Slim, a purportedly American drug that the ministry said actually likely originates in China. ...

Less than a week after a government minister said he could not say when long-awaited restrictions on smoking in public places would come into effect, one health official expressed confusion at the seemingly stalled progress, especially as compared to an overnight ban placed last year ...

A new government initiative to warn Cambodians about the dangers of smoking tobacco was launched yesterday by the Ministry of Health and World Health Organization. ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday called for people to be more careful with what they ingest, as the death toll from rice wine poisoning in the past week rose to 20 with another death in Kratie province and two others reported dead in remote ...

Authorities in Kratie province have ordered an emergency ban on the production of rice wine as the death toll from methanol poisoning in the province over the past five days rose to 17 with the deaths on Sunday of five people in Chet Borei district. ...

Rice wine brewed with a toxic level of alcohol has killed at least 19 people and left 172 more in hospital in northeast Cambodia, the health ministry said Sunday.“Laboratory tests found the deaths were caused by the high methanol level in the wine,” Ly Sovann, ...