Health authorities in the central province of Quang Ngai Wednesday said 19 local people have died from an unidentified skin condition over the last 12 months. This is 11 more than the figure reported earlier by authorities in Ba To District, the disease’s epicenter. Le Han Phong, chairman of Ba To People’s Committee, said the earlier figure did not take into account the victims who had died at home. “We know about the deaths, but [...]

An eight-year-old girl with a massive tumor on her left leg has been diagnosed with congenital soft tissue dysplasia – a localized malformation of covering soft tissues in children. Doctors at Ho Chi Minh City Children’s Hospital 2 made the statement after conducting tests on Nguyen Thi Loan, who hails from the Central Highlands province of Lam Dong. The tumor on Loan’s leg weighs 15 kilograms, while Loan herself only weighs 25 kg. Doctors will [...]

Vietnam is facing a double problem as the rate of children under five suffering malnutrition remains high while the rate of obesity in kids is on the rise, according to a survey announced Wednesday. A report on Dan Tri that day quoted Le Danh Tuyen, deputy chief of the National Institute of Nutrition, as saying that the survey conducted among children under five years old in 2009 and 2010 found the rate of malnourished kids [...]

You will never find it in a museum but phở is one of Vietnam’s most sacred and tantalizingly beautiful forms of art. Phở is the national dish of Vietnam and can be enjoyed from the northern boarder with China all the way down to the southern tip of Vietnam. Depending on location the experience can be very different but the fundamentals are always the same. Phở is technically a noodle but the term is now [...]

The hand, foot and mouth infection rate in Vietnam is the fourth highest in Asia and the year-on-year rise in infection is far higher than others, a Health Ministry official has said. Tran Thanh Duong, deputy head of the ministry’s Preventive Health Department, was quoted by news website VnExpress in a Thursday report as saying the disease has been developing in contrast to the ministry’s forecast, while many localities were not working very hard to [...]

Vietnam ranks 12th among 22 countries with the world’s highest numbers of tuberculosis patients, a representative of the National Tuberculosis Control program told the press Monday. Program director Dr. Dinh Ngoc Sy said at the moment there were at least 300,000 TB infections across the country. Every year some 200,000 new cases are reported and 30,000 die of the disease, he said. According to Sy, the number of TB patients in Vietnam is the fourth [...]

A young day laborer in Binh Duong has become the third bird flu (H5N1) patient in Vietnam so far this year. Truong Phu Son, 22, is in critical condition after being admitted to the hospital two days earlier, a doctor from the HCMC Tropical Hospital said Sunday. “He is under an intensive care program proposed by the Health Ministry. However, he is still has a fever and respiratory failure. There’s not much [positive] to predict [...]

The National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology (NIHE) is conducting the third stage of tests to determine whether the H5N1 vaccine is safe for humans. The testing is expected to finish by the end of 2012. Nguyen Thi Thu Van, director of the Company for Vaccine and Biological Production No.1, the producer of the vaccine, said 1,200 healthy volunteers in Thanh Hoa and Ha Nam Provinces had signed up for the clinical trials of the [...]

Vietnam’s agriculture minister called an urgent meeting Sunday demanding local authorities adopt better measures for bird flu prevention, given that the virus has mutated and become more lethal. Cao Duc Phat, minister of Agriculture and Rural Development and head of the National Steering Committee of Bird Flu Prevention, said at the meeting that the condition is spreading widely and preventative policies are more important than ever. The disease has recurred this year in the northern [...]

A 22-month-old child in the central city of Da Nang has become the first to be killed by the hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) in Vietnam this year, VnExpress Friday. Da Nang’s Department of Preventive Health on Friday was quoted as saying that tests at the Nha Trang Pasteur Institute in the central province of Khanh Hoa showed that Nguyen Anh Khoa tested positive for Enterovirus 71, which causes the disease. The boy had a fever on [...]