RxPG News : China Healthcare

Chinese mayor sacked over baby food scandal

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:56:50 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Beijing, Sep 18 - China Thursday sacked the mayor of the northern city of Shijiazhuang, the base of the company which marketed contaminated baby food that led to the death of three infants and made more than 6,000 ill.

Ji Chuntang's dismissal from office, the fifth in the fallout of the baby food scandal, was announced at the provincial legislature, a day after Ji was removed from his post as vice secretary of the Shijiazhuang Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China -.

Authorities said dairy product giant Sanlu group, based in Shijiazhuang, knew that the baby food it marketed was contaminated with highly toxic industrial chemical melamine.

Melamine, high in nitrogen, is used to make plastics and fertilizers. But in the past, some Chinese farmers have used the additive to artificially increase protein levels.

Four officials in Shijiazhuang had been dismissed before Ji Chuntang. They included vice mayor in charge of agricultural production, head of animal husbandry and fishery bureau, director of food and drug administration and head of quality supervision bureau.

The police have so far arrested 18 suspects in connection with the scandal. Six of them allegedly sold melamine to milk dealers, while the other 12 were milk dealers who added the chemical to milk and sold it to dairy product companies.

A woman changes lepers' world in China

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 08:43:16 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Guangzhou -, Jan 2 - A 60-year-old woman has brought about a revolution in the lives of lepers in China.

Fu Pochu, an energetic and determined retiree from Hong Kong, decided one day to live in a leper colony and offer free care to people there. That momentous decision has made a huge difference to hundreds of lepers in south China.

Fu is the only nurse at the Tanshan Leper Rehabilitation Village in Gaoming district. She has devoted three years of her life to improving medical care and helping patients cured of the disease to live a more normal life.

In the past, people diagnosed with the terrible disease were banished from their villages and forced to live in isolation.

Fu, who is not married, never uses cosmetics or wears jewellery. She shuns air conditioners and instead uses two electric fans during summer.

Thanks to Fu, ordinary people's fears about the rehabilitated village are melting away. People from all walks of life are showing greater understanding of the lepers and aid is pouring in.

Leprosy has officially been eradicated in China.

Once thought to be incurable, leprosy can be easily cured with a 6-12-month multi-therapy antibiotic treatment introduced in 1982. However, pockets of infection still remain in impoverished parts of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou and Tibet in the west.

The disease used to be so feared in China that victims were burnt or buried alive. From the 1950s, sufferers were exiled to far-flung places so they would have no contact with the public.

China stopped this in the 1980s but hundreds of leper colonies remain.

They are home to about 200,000 recovered lepers and their descendants, who have little or no hope of ever rejoining society because of the stigma attached to the disease.

No longer considered infectious, the recovered lepers still bear the scars of the disease that destroys the skin, peripheral nerves and mucous membranes, resulting in the loss of fingers, toes and limbs and damage to eyes.

Fu Pochu used to work as a nurse at Nam Lang Hospital in Hong Kong. After a leg injury, she was given artificial hipbones in an operation and decided to retire in 1997.

Her first experience of leprosy came in a leper village in Panyu during a 2002 tour organised by the Hong Kong Medical Mobilization Corp, a registered non-profit charitable body.

Fu observed that people diagnosed with the disease were shunned by society and even their relatives abandoned them.

'Leprosy runs deep. It's not so difficult to cure the ulcers, but the wounds to the heart take a long time to heal,' said Fu.

To her astonishment, none of the 30 or so leper villages she visited in Guangdong in 2002 had nurses. So she decided to settle down in the Tanshan Leper Rehabilitation Village where 102 patients live and where conditions are believed to be the poorest. Most people there are senior citizens.

There is one hospital in the village and Fu is the only nurse. A Christian, she tends to the lepers' ulcers and treats them as normal people.

She has organised entertainment activities at festive occasions such as mid-Autumn Festival and Christmas and distributed souvenirs bought in Hong Kong.

'I am here to treat their wounded hearts as well as their ulcers,' said Fu, who spends four months a year in the leper village.

'It is necessary for us to give them more care and warmth so that they can feel human compassion before they die.'

Fu's devotion has not only moved medical doctors working with the village hospital but also dispelled the phobia felt by healthy residents from nearby villages toward the leper colony.

Conditions at Tanshan Leper Rehab Village are improving. Houses have been built with government subsidies. Construction has started on a cement road linking the village to the outside world.

'I am a candle, I want to brighten up the hearts of as many lepers as I can before I finish my work here,' said Fu, adding that she intends to take care of another leper colony in Zhaoqing, where conditions are worse than in Tanshan.

As the New Year begins, the candle burns brightly.

China issues bird flu alert

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:20:42 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Beijing, Nov 29 - China has issued an alert in six provinces to step up vigilance following an outbreak of bird flu in South Korea, according to the agriculture ministry.

South Korea Tuesday reported its second outbreak in two weeks, with 236,000 chickens as well as pigs and dogs culled.

Heilongjiang, Jilin, Liaoning, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces are all relatively close to South Korea.

The agriculture ministry said the outbreak poses a serious threat to China as the two countries are located on the same bird migratory route between East Asia and Australia.

The ministry has ordered the six provinces to dispatch more staff to monitor borders and migratory bird habitats.

Officials in Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning have been ordered to work round the clock to collect and send suspicious samples to the state bird flu laboratory, according to the ministry.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong has also suspended poultry product imports from South Korea.

Ageing China faces rural healthcare vacuum

Thu, 23 Nov 2006 15:06:54 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Beijing, Nov 23 (DPA) Rapid socio-economic changes and the effects of China's one-child family-planning policy mean that many elderly members face old age with virtually no healthcare.

Elderly farmers across China have a common saying about healthcare: 'Small illness, don't check; big illness, await death'.

'The main problem in China is that we have become old before we became rich,' said Wang Guixin, a demographer at Shanghai's Fudan University.

'The situation in developed countries is that they are rich enough to afford the expenditure on old people, but we are not,' Wang said.

'The speed and spread of the ageing problem in China is quite fast,' he added.

About 143 million, or 11 percent, of China's 1.3 billion people are over 60 years old. The number of over-60s is forecast to hit 13 percent or 174 million in 2010 and 30 percent in 2050.

The ageing of Chinese society is most acute in Shanghai, its largest and wealthiest city.

But in Shanghai and most urban areas, retired people get basic pension and healthcare through local social-security coverage or their former state work units.

However, in most rural areas, where two-thirds of China's population still lives, there is almost no coverage for ordinary people.

Labour and Social Security Minister Tian Chengping said last month that different forms of pensions covered only 19 percent of the estimated 918 million Chinese people of working age at the end of 2005.

More than 85 percent of rural elderly have no social-security benefits, with most relying on their families for support, said Yao Yuan, director of the Population Institute at People's University in Beijing.

The problem is only likely to worsen in the coming decades.

The one-child policy was introduced in the late 1970s after Mao Zedong's policy of encouraging more births in the 1950s and 1960s.

These 'baby boomers' will cause a new surge in the number of over-60s in the next 25 years.

They already suffer from the '1-2-4' problem of a single child sometimes having to care for not only two parents but also four grandparents.

'The one-child policy has accelerated the ageing of the Chinese population,' Yao said. '(But) the ageing problem is inevitable whether or not we conducted the one-child policy.'

In a report last year, the World Bank urged the central government to consider direct funding of local health initiatives or find other ways to reduce the need for local governments in poor areas to fund healthcare.

A small-scale health-insurance programme has proved popular. Farmers pay 30 yuan (about $4) per person annually in return for coverage of 70 percent of any medical expenses over 10,000 yuan.

'But this policy has not been expanded on a large-scale in China, especially in poor areas,' Yao said. 'It still needs more financial and strategic support from the central government.'

Another pilot scheme provides a token annual allowance of 600 yuan to elderly residents without sons in some rural areas.

In the absence of pensions and modern healthcare, some people turn to Chinese medicine or even superstition.

Thousands of elderly people joined the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which was banned in 1999, in the belief that its breathing and meditation exercises could cure their health problems.

The number of elderly people joining spiritual and religious groups is still rising, especially among women, Yao said.

Yao saw other demographic trends affecting the demands on the government to care for China's ageing population.

'More and more rural young have moved to urban areas to make a living there,' Yao said, often leaving elderly parents in their home villages.

Wide imbalances in economic development have exacerbated the problems, Wang said.

'Modern healthcare cannot cover some poor or remote areas,' he said.

'If they cannot get money from relatives or sons and daughters,' Wang added, 'they can only wait for death.'

30 percent increase in HIV cases in China: report

Wed, 22 Nov 2006 23:56:05 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Beijing, Nov 22 (DPA) HIV is spreading in China from high-risk groups to the general public as the number of reported infections has grown by nearly 30 percent this year, the China Daily said Wednesday.

The latest statistics from the health ministry showed the reported number of cases has grown to 183,733 this year, up from 144,089 at the end of last year, the newspaper said. Of the reported cases, 40,667 have developed into AIDS.

'Health officials attributed many of the new cases to better reporting of existing cases, though they also warned that the virus seemed to be spreading from high-risk groups to the general public,' the China Daily said.

However, experts from the UN and the health ministry said the true number of cases far exceeded those reported to the government. They estimated that about 650,000 people in China carried HIV at the end of December 2005, suggesting that many people were unaware they carried the virus, the newspaper reported.

As of Oct 31, 12,464 people have died in China as a result of illnesses associated with HIV, Hao Yang, deputy director of the ministry's Disease Control Bureau, was quoted as saying.

The virus appeared to be spreading from so-called high-risk groups to the general public, Hao said.

Unsafe sexual contact was causing increasingly more infections, representing 28 percent of the total. Before 2002, 10 percent of all infections were caused by sexual contact, the paper said.

Drug abuse accounted for 37 percent of the cases reported in the first 10 months of the year.

Hao said drug abuse and unsafe sexual activity posed a great danger because effective measures to prevent that kind of behaviour 'are not yet in place'.

An investigation by public health workers found that only 38 percent of prostitutes in certain areas insisted on using condoms during intercourse and about half of the drug abusers surveyed still shared needles while taking intravenous drugs.

Statistics showed that in some areas the infection rate among gay men was 1 to 4 percent. The report did not give further details.

Among the total reported cases this year, 5.1 percent were caused by people selling blood illegally or receiving infected blood from hospitals, the paper said.

GenoMed CEO Invited to Speak at World DNA Day in China

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:07:38 PST

( from http://www.rxpgnews.com ) GenoMed Inc. ("the Company" or "GenoMed") (National Quotation Bureau's Pink Sheets Symbol GMED) announced today that its CEO, David Moskowitz MD, was invited to speak yesterday at World DNA and Genome Day in Dalian, China (www.dnaday.com) on "Genomics and Cardiovascular Disease."

Said Dr. Moskowitz, "It's an extraordinary honor to be invited to such a prestigious gathering of Nobel prize-winners and other scientific luminaries. Genomics is fulfilling the hope that thousands of physician-scientists have entertained for several thousand years: to find the source of human diseases so we can stop them. It's like finding the headwaters of a river in order to dam it."

Dr. Moskowitz continued, "Overactivity of angiotensin I-converting enzyme, known as 'ACE,' seems to be the cause of most diseases of aging, including cardiovascular disease and cancer, the two main causes of death in the U.S. Inhibitors of ACE have been used for over 25 years, although not in the doses pioneered by GenoMed. Actual patient outcomes over the next decade or two will prove whether we've found the Fountain of Youth or not. This hypothesis comes at a good time for Baby Boomers like me."