Health

More than 140,000 people died from measles last year as the number of cases around the world surged once again, official estimates suggest. Most of the lives cut short were children aged under five. The situation has been described by health experts as staggering, an outrage, a tragedy and easily preventable with vaccines.Huge progress has been made since the year ...

Social media giants must crack down on anti-vaccination posts that are fuelling Samoa’s deadly measles epidemic from afar, UNICEF’s Pacific islands chief said Thursday. Sheldon Yett, the regional representative for the UN children’s agency, said “incredibly irresponsible” online material on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram had exacerbated the Samoa measles outbreak — which has claimed 62 lives since ...

A new typhoid vaccine works “fantastically well” and is being used to help stop an almost untreatable strain of the infection, doctors say. Cases of the bacterial disease fell by more than 80% in trials, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.Experts said the vaccine was a game-changer and would reduce the “terrible toll wrought by typhoid”. Nine million ...

The World Health Organisation warned of a “slide back” in global efforts to eliminate measles Tuesday, as the death toll from an outbreak that has killed dozens of children in Samoa continued to climb. A total of 55 people have died since the epidemic began in mid-October, 50 of them children aged four or under, officials in the Pacific nation ...

The World Aids Day is being observed across the country as elsewhere in the globe today. The theme of this year’s World AIDS Day is “Communities make the difference”. President M Abdul Hamid and Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina issued separate messages on the eve of the day wishing all-out success of the programmes marking the day.In separate messages, they appreciated ...

China’s new vaccine administration law, adopted by the country’s top legislature in June and expected to address prominent problems in the industry, will go into effect on Sunday. According to the law, the supervision of vaccines will cover the whole process from vaccine development, production and distribution to vaccination. Specialized inspection teams of pharmaceutical professionals will be established at the ...

New Zealand announced extra aid for Samoa Friday as the Pacific nation’s measles epidemic raced past 3,000 cases and experts warned the number could double before the crisis was over. Samoa’s government said the death toll from the outbreak had reached 42, up three in 24 hours, while the overall number of cases rose by 213 to 3,149 over the ...

A measles epidemic raging in Samoa has killed 37 people, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, blaming an anti-vaccine messaging campaign for leaving the Pacific island nation vulnerable to the spread of the virus. The UN health agency warned that a steep decline in vaccination rates in Samoa, a Pacific Ocean island nation halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand, had ...

Yoga and physical therapy(PT) are effective approaches to treating co-occurring sleep disturbance and back pain while reducing the need for medication, a new study suggests. Published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the research from Boston University in US, showed significant improvements in sleep quality lasting 52 weeks after 12 weeks of yoga classes or 1-on-1 PT, which suggests ...

The death toll from a measles epidemic in Samoa rose to 32 on Tuesday as infection rates continue to soar out of control in the Pacific island nation, official data showed. According to government figures, 28 of the dead were children aged four or under. The total number of measles cases was 2,437. Samoa has declared a state of emergency ...