One billion people cannot afford healthcare: WHO

LONDON (Reuters) – Around a billion people cannot afford any health services, and paying for health-care pushes about 100 million people a year into poverty, the World Health Organization said on Monday.

In a global report on financing health systems, the United Nations health body said all countries, rich and poor could do more toward getting universal coverage and urged them to think about ways to increase efficiency and use new taxes and innovative fund-raising measures to boost access to health-care. AGENCIES

Malarial drug resistance spreads in Asia

GENEVA: The World Health Organisation warned Thursday that resistance to malaria drug artemisinin appeared to be spreading in the region from the Cambodia-Thailand border, where it was first detected.

“There is some early evidence that resistance to artemisinins may also be emerging on the Myanmar-Thailand border,” said the WHO in a statement.

“There is also concern that resistance could spread from the Cambodia-Thailand border to Africa, as it did with anti-malaria drugs such as chloroquine and sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine in the 1960s and 1970s,” it added.

Pascal Ringwald, who co-authored a WHO study into the issue, said the WHO is undertaking “complementary studies to confirm that it is indeed drug resistance. That should take a year.”

In February 2009, anti-malarial drug resistance was confirmed by the WHO at the Cambodia-Thailand

Path to Haiti polls clouded as cholera spreads

PORTAUPRINCE: The death toll from Haiti’s spreading cholera epidemic topped 300 on Wednesday as fears over violence and fair voting clouded the path to elections next month which are seen as key to stability in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Electoral officials still say the presidential and legislative polls will go ahead as scheduled on November 28, despite the cholera outbreak which has killed more than 300 people and sickened more than 4,700 since last week, triggering a major multinational treatment and prevention operation.

“On November 28, at 6 a.m., the polls will open,” Pierre-Louis Opont, director general of Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council, told Reuters. But one presidential candidate has said that if the epidemic of the deadly diarrhea disease reaches national proportions, the polls should be postponed.

The World Health Organization

Dengue claims two lives in Pakistan

Staff Report

KARACHI: Two people died of dengue fever in Lahore and Hyderabad and another 152 patients tested positive for the deadly mosquito-borne disease in different hospitals of Karachi over the past 24 hours.

Failing to take timely preventive measures against the outbreak, the Punjab government on Saturday replaced EDO Health Dr. Fayyaz Ranjha with Dr. Umar Farooq.

With no known treatment, dengue fever is spreading fast in Asia, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO has warned that 2.5 billion people are at risk from one of the world’s fastest-emerging infections, which has “grown dramatically in recent decades.”

Officials at the WHO say Asia, home to 70% of the at-risk population, has seen a rise in dengue mainly because of higher temperatures due to climate change, rising populations and greater international

Quake-hit Haiti battles cholera epidemic, 138 dead

PORT-AU-PRINCE: Haiti’s government and its aid partners fought on Friday to contain a cholera epidemic that has killed at least 138 people in the nation’s worst medical emergency since the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said the virulent diarrheal disease, which had affected 1,526 people as of late Thursday, would be the first cholera epidemic in a century in the disaster-prone Caribbean nation, already the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

The Red Cross and other humanitarian agencies were rushing doctors, medical supplies and clean water to Saint-Marc in the Artibonite region, the main outbreak zone north of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The region is Haiti’s central breadbasket and had received tens of thousands of fleeing survivors from the Jan. 12 quake.

The earthquake killed up to 300,000 people and injured

Malaria deaths in India 13 times more than thought – study

NEWDEHLI: Malaria kills more than 200,000 people in India each year, 13 times higher than UN estimates, according to a paper published online Thursday by The Lancet.

The UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO) says that the malarial death toll in India, the most populous country where the disease is endemic, is around 15,000 annually, comprising 5,000 children and 10,000 adults.

But the new study says the WHO’s reporting method is flawed, as it depends indirectly on patients who have been diagnosed by a doctor.

Many deaths in India occur at home, rather than in a hospital or a clinic, which means the underlying cause of many malaria fatalities is likely to be misattributed, it says.

Investigators sent out field workers to 6,671 randomly-selected areas of India to interview relatives or careworkers of 122,000 people who had died between 2001 and

Google to introduce Street View in Germany

BERLIN: Google will introduce its Street View mapping feature for 20 of Germany’s largest cities before the end of the year, the company announced Tuesday, launching a new debate over privacy in Germany.

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Google to introduce Street View in Germany

Kiwis thrash India by 200 runs in ODI

DAMBULLA, Sri Lanka: New Zealand has beaten India by 200 runs at Rangiri Dambulla International Stadium in the one-day international tri-series opener on Tuesday.

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Kiwis thrash India by 200 runs in ODI

Indian PM appeals for calm as Kashmiris protest

OCCUPIED SRINAGAR: India’s prime minister on Tuesday appealed for a calm in Indian-occupied Kashmir as thousands of local Muslims marched and offered special prayers in open fields to honor those killed in recent civil unrest.

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Indian PM appeals for calm as Kashmiris protest

Lebanon criticizes US for suspending military aid

BEIRUT: Lebanon criticized on Tuesday a U.

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Lebanon criticizes US for suspending military aid

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