Public health

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc has issued an urgent dispatch on preventing the acute respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus (nCoV) strain, which is developing complicatedly in China without specific treatment and preventive vaccine yet. The dispatch was sent to the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Foreign ...

Closing live animal markets that trade in wildlife, strengthening efforts to combat trafficking of wild animals, and working to change dangerous wildlife consumption behaviours are all needed, said the leading wildlife conservation group, WCS. With the outbreak of the Wuhan Coronavirus, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) ...

The global toll of dengue fever is becoming well known, with rising temperatures contributing to severe outbreaks that made 2019 the worst year on record for the disease. In 1970 only nine countries faced severe dengue outbreaks. But the disease, which is spread by mosquitoes that ...

Meet Heng Kim Seng, Cambodia’s bat man. In a few years, he went from rice to riches all because of bats. Under the Khmer Rouge, he hauled human waste to make the rice grow, and now he sells bat feces or “guano” as a natural fertilizer, ...

The National Committee for Sub-National Democratic Development (NCDD) has approved a draft sub-decree to improve the provision of health services in a quality, safe, effective and equitable manner. Consisting of eight chapters and 27 articles, the sub-decree outlines the delegating of authority in health service provision ...

Growing up in a rough neighbourhood rife with gambling and prostitution, peer pressure drove 31-year-old Oun* into using drugs while he was a teenager.  Addiction soon followed, leading to him quit school during his third year of junior high. Later, as his strained relations with his ...

Ian G. Baird, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on dams in Southeast Asia, tells of meeting a farmer  and his five-year-old son from a village in rural Laos in 2009. The two were sitting in a canoe as the sun rose ...

Local empowerment has become the best prevention measure against diseases and accidents in two Chiang Mai communities, who have learned firsthand how collective grassroots action can keep them safe. Dengue fever has terrorised the communities in tambon Ban Luang in Chom Thong district for years. Locals ...

Lao health officials and medical staff at hospitals across the country, are endeavouring to combat the increasing number of dengue fever cases in 2019. Many hospitals in the capital of Vientiane have converted corridors and meeting rooms into wards due to a lack of space to ...

Although Thailand is still lagging behind other countries in developing cannabis-based medication, Thai medical researchers hope frozen knowledge could be renewed and extended to serve patients’ needs, especially in the field of traditional medicine. The latest progress on medical cannabis was shared with participants in a ...