Public health

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 ...

Three months after the Health Ministry proclaimed Cambodia measles-free—after tests on a child suspected to be carrying the disease came back negative—it announced on Wednesday that a 7-month-old in Kompong Speu province has contracted the highly contagious virus. It is the first confirmed case in ...

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 ...

Patrick Heuveline sat among villagers in Cambodia, showing them photos of his daughter to establish common ground with a group of people whose culture he had yet to fully understand.Heuveline, a UCLA sociology professor since 2007, has now spent about 15 years studying the effects ...

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. ...

The head of the government’s National Malaria Center said on Tuesday that mefloquine-based malaria drugs began arriving in western Cambodia earlier this month, two years after local and international health experts agreed they were needed to combat the parasite’s growing resistance to other medicines. ...

According to psycologists working in Cambodia, their lack of peers withing the country is a problem that needs to be addressed. The experts believe that to further develop the country, psychology services should be integrated into many of the key sectors including health, social work, ...

The Ministry of Health yesterday launched a nationwide program aimed at holding back the spread of drug-resistant diseases.Microbes are continuing to evolve resistance to drugs at an alarming rate all over the world, often due to the unsupervised and inappropriate use of antimicrobials, health experts ...

A new study by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) has confirmed that resistance is growing to one of the key drugs being used to fight malaria in Cambodia, a situation likely to worsen and which could lead to a growing caseload in the ...

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 ...

The number of mothers who died in labour has nearly halved over the past four years, down from 182 fatalities in 2011 to 100 this year, the ministry’s research commission into maternal mortality revealed yesterday.The dramatically reduced death rate was largely due to improvements in ...

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. ...

In Cambodia almost anyone who sees a doctor or goes to hospital, is given an injection or put on an intravenous drip. This is what patients want, and what medical staff give them – it has become part of the healthcare routine. But it has ...

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 ...

Cambodian health officials have been sent to a northeastern district where 10 people died and more than 100 were sickened in two separate incidents linked to the consumption of dog meat and rice wine, a medical officer said Friday. ...

Minister of Health Mam Bunheng yesterday asked the public to stop drinking rice wine and eating sick animals after 19 people died and 170 fell ill in Kratie province over the past month. ...

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. ...