Yemen cholera cases pass 100,000 mark, says WHO
Melanoma patients who remove lymph nodes don’t live longer: study
GENEVA, June 8, (Agencies): The number of suspected cholera cases in war-torn Yemen has risen to more than 100,000 since an outbreak began on April 27, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
The rapid spread of the disease through 19 of Yemen’s 23 governorates highlighted a humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen after two years of civil war that has disabled most healthcare facilities, according to the UN humanitarian office.
“To date, 101,820 suspected cholera cases and 789 deaths have been reported in 19 governorates,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told Reuters.
The WHO has warned that the number of cases could hit 300,000, but the daily number of new ones declined slightly in the week to June 5 to 3,432, compared with 3,651 in the previous seven-day period.
“Yemen is in the grip of a severe cholera epidemic of an unprecedented scale,” the UN humanitarian office said in a report published on Wednesday.
“Malnourished children and women, people living with other chronic health conditions and households that do not have enough to eat are now at greater risk of death as they face the ‘triple threat’ of conflict, famine and cholera,” it said.
The war has left 19 million of its 28 million people needing humanitarian aid and many of them on the verge of famine. The cholera outbreak is the second wave of an epidemic that began in October, spread until December and then dwindled but was never brought fully under control.
Aid charity Oxfam called for a “cholera ceasefire” to allow health workers to halt the spread of the disease, adding that the published numbers were probably an underestimate.
Cholera is caused by ingesting bacteria from water or food contaminated with faeces. It usually manifests itself with sudden acute diarrhoea and can kill within hours, although threequarters of infected people show no symptoms.
The short incubation period means outbreaks can spread quickly, especially in places without safe water or sanitation.
MIAMI:
Also:
People diagnosed with melanoma who then undergo surgery to have lymph nodes removed near the original tumor site do not live longer than patients who forego this common operation, researchers said Wednesday.
The report in the New England Journal of Medicine was based on a study of more than 1,900 patients with melanoma, the deadliest kind of skin cancer, at more than 60 medical institutions worldwide.
When people are newly diagnosed with melanoma that has spread to one or more lymph nodes, they must decide whether or not to undergo extensive surgery to remove all the remaining nodes in that area of the body.
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI:
India’s drugpricing regulator has asked the health ministry to add four more medical devices to a list of products eligible for price controls to reduce costs to patients, which if agreed could be another blow to the country’s $5 billiona-year medical-technology industry.
The National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) had said it did not plan further measures after prices of some heart stents were cut in February by 75 percent, part of a government push to make life-saving drugs and devices more affordable.
HYDERABAD:
More than 5,000 Indians have lined up in the country’s south, pinching their noses and sticking their tongues out to swallow live fish in an unusual traditional treatment for asthma.
Every year in June asthma patients gather in the southern city of Hyderabad to gulp down the fish stuffed with a yellow herbal paste, hoping it will help them breathe more easily.
The wriggling five-centimetre (twoinch) murrel fish are slipped into the throats of patients in a bizarre treatment that leaves them gagging.