Priority health concerns

The United Nations has expressed admiration to Cambodia for having responded successfully to the spread of HIV/AIDS, reported the state news agency-AKP. According to an official report, Cambodia has currently over 700,000 people living with HIV/AIDS and some 500,000 of them are receiving antiretroviral treatment. ...

Prime Minister Hun Sen has called for stronger enforcement of regulations on the promotion and sale of baby formula, linking a decrease in the number of women who breast-feed to an increase in un­lawful and misleading advertising that misrepresents milk substitutes and deceives new mothers. ...

Som Saron has not worked since testing positive for HIV late last year. Taking care of her young niece at her parents’ home in Roka commune last week, the 37-year-old said that a fear of being stigmatized kept her from walking the community’s gravel roads selling ...

Three weeks after the Health Ministry announced that measles had reappeared in Cambodia, a ministry official said Thursday that the highly contagious disease had in fact not been found. ...

Baby formula companies are pushing their products in clinics and on health care professionals—some with great effect—despite a government ban on such acts and extensive research showing that formula is an inferior alternative to mother’s milk. ...

The percentage of smokers over the age of 15 has dropped from 19.5 percent in 2011 to 16.9 percent last year, according to the National Adult Tobacco Survey which was released yesterday by the National Institute of Statistics. ...

A Cambodian medical research­er has received international rec­ognition for a presentation on de­velopments in the treatment of pa­tients infected with both HIV and tuberculosis at a conference in France last week. ...

Cambodia’s efforts in HIV prevention and treatment have shown significant results in the past ten years and the government is now setting the bar even higher. Last December, Prime Minister Hun Sen committed to stopping new HIV infections by 2020. ...

More than 20 HIV-infected villagers provided testimony during the third day of the trial of an unlicensed medic—accused of infecting more than 270 people with the virus—at the Battambang Provincial Court on Thursday, a court official said. ...

Kantha Bopha Jayavarman VII hospital here sees about 75 new babies born every night – not quite the falling birth rate it had been expecting just two years ago. ...

An unlicensed doctor allegedly at the centre of a medical scandal that has seen almost 300 residents of Battambang province’s Roka village infected with HIV proclaimed his innocence during the first day of his highly anticipated trial yesterday. After the judge read the charges to ...

Cambodia’s fight against malaria is at risk of being derailed because of a dispute over expenses payments between the Cambodian government and the Global Fund, the biggest donor to the country’s malaria programme. ...

An unlicensed health worker charged in Cambodia with murder and other crimes after allegedly causing a mass HIV infection by treating patients with reused needles will be brought to trial next week, sources said. ...

Millions of dollars of aid money granted to Cambodia by the Global Fund to combat malaria have been left sitting in a bank account for more than a year, official documents seen by the Post show.The money remains untouched because the National Malaria Centre (CNM) ...

Fires set by plantation owners in Indonesia may be to blame for the smog hanging over Phnom Penh, the Ministry of the Environment said yesterday. “I know there is a serious problem with haze,” Ministry spokesman Sao Sopheap told Khmer Times. “We have noticed haze ...

As Cambodia contends with one of the strongest El Niño cycles in recent memory, a new study of millions of dengue cases over the past two-decades-plus has shown that spikes in the deadly disease across Southeast Asia may be linked to the weather phenomenon.Upswings in ...

Tuberculosis (TB) is still a major health problem in Cambodia. Natalie Lorent, PhD student at the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM) and the University of Antwerp (UA), conducted her research in the slums of Phnom Penh, where tuberculosis (TB) wreaks havoc. Lorent and her team ...

Cambodia is now free of “blue-ear” pig disease, which had infected more than 4,000 pigs in five provinces last month, the Ministry of Agriculture said yesterday. ...

Cambodian health officials say they remain on alert for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS. Cambodia has trained hundreds of health workers to respond to the disease, though no infections have yet been reported in Cambodia, Ly Sovann, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health, ...

Dengue fever has killed 24 people so far this year, most of them children. As dengue fever cases continue to rise in Siem Reap province, the statistics seem scary. Death by dengue, however, is most often due to complications stemming from multiple infections coupled with ...

The Ministry of Agriculture said yesterday that the spread of the swine illness “blue-ear disease” is starting to decline, but urged for strict controls to be maintained on the transport of pigs around the country. ...

Dengue fever cases have shot up 350 percent in the first 34 weeks of this year compared to the same period last year, according to the government’s latest figures, but are still lower than the number of cases recorded in the three years prior to ...

The recent outbreak of “blue-ear pig disease” in two districts of Siem Reap province has been successfully contained, but consumer demand for pork in the province has not recovered, a senior official said. ...

A new outbreak of Porcine Reproductive and Respiratory Syndrome (PRRS) has taken the lives of more than 1,200 pigs while infecting some 3,200 more in three districts across Cambodia’s Siem Reap province since mid-August, according to Chinese News Agency-Xinhua. ...