Category: Berita

The Indonesian government is warning pilgrims about a viral respiratory disease that spread rapidly in Saudi Arabia in recent weeks.

With an outbreak of the deadly Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) reported in Saudi Arabia, Indonesian health officials are moving to prevent the infectious disease from spreading to the archipelago.

Hajj pilgrims from Indonesia in particular, could be exposed to the virus in crowds at Mecca and at other sites in the kingdom and then bring it home, officials warn.

On Friday (May 2nd), the Indonesian government announced it would work with Saudi Arabia and other nations to contain the health threat, state-run Antara reported.

The Health Ministry also notified Indonesians travelling to Saudi Arabia– particularly those going on minor Hajj pilgrimages– to take precautions against the disease, Antara quoted Health Minister Nafsiah Mboi as saying. Its symptoms are similar to bird flu or avian influenza.

As many as 138 cases of MERS-CoV were identified in Saudi Arabia between April 11th and 26th, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). As of April 26th, WHO counted 261 lab-confirmed cases worldwide since September 2012, including 95 fatal ones.

Getting the word out

No MERS-CoV cases have been reported in Indonesia, but a 61-year-old Indonesian man living in Saudi Arabia died of the disease in a Jeddah hospital on April 27th, Tjandra Yoga Aditama, disease control and environment health director for the Health Ministry, told reporters April 29th.

The Indonesian government will follow up by tracking down people who interacted with this man, Tjandra said.

“We will continue this process for the next two weeks with the Indonesian Consulate in Saudi Arabia, as well as with the World Health Organisation. We will also have a meeting with future Muslim pilgrims from Indonesia to ensure their safe travel,” he told Khabar Southeast Asia.

Because as many as 250,000 pilgrims from Indonesia go on Hajj every year, the government is now busy informing those travellers about the risks of exposure to MERS-CoV, Religious Affairs Minister Suryadharma Ali said.

“With this huge number of people, every citizen must be aware of this virus. Every citizen is responsible to look after [his] health and resilience while performing Hajj,” he told reporters.

Despite the health scare, Jakarta resident Farida Manti plans to join the throngs of Muslims from across the globe converging on Mecca for the Hajj in early October.

“I only can take preventative measures to avoid this virus. However, I will not cancel the pilgrim trip. I have been planning this for years,” Farida, who plans to attend with seven relatives, told Khabar.

source: khabarsoutheastasia.com

 

Antibiotic-resistant “super bugs” have become a major threat to public health around the world, the United Nations says in a report released this week.

The U.N. World Health Organization report focuses on bacteria that have evolved to the point where current antibiotics no longer can combat them to treat the infections they’re responsible for.

The report is not a warning for a future time, U.N. officials say, because the threat is here today and puts persons of any age living in any country in the world at risk.

The time to act is now, they say.

“Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” said Keiji Fukuda, WHO Assistant Director-General for Health Security.

The United Nations’ concern over the issue is shared by a number of world health entities.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has predicted “potentially catastrophic consequences” that could prevail if bacteria continue to evade treatment, noting super bug infections are involved in the deaths of around 23,000 in the United States annually.

Elevated resistance rates have been found globally in common bacteria involved in infections of the bloodstream, wounds, and the urinary tract.

Drug-resistant strains of bacteria that cause pneumonia and tuberculosis have also been seen worldwide, the U.N. report noted.

Pneumonia bacteria that are increasingly resistant to penicillin are now showing up in more than 50 percent of pneumonia cases in some areas of the world, it said.

In some parts of the Americas, the reported noted, as many as nine out of 10 infections involving Staphylococcus aureus are proving resistant to the antibiotic methicillin, a situation garnering its own acronym, MRSA.

As more bacteria show signs of antibiotic resistance, it raises the specter of diseases spreading more quickly and a corresponding higher death rate, Fukuda said.

“Effective antibiotics have been one of the pillars allowing us to live longer, live healthier, and benefit from modern medicine,” he said.

Changes are needed in the way in which antibiotics are produced, prescribed and used or more and more of them will become ineffective with disastrous implications for the future, he said.

source: www.techtimes.com

 

Geneva: A landmark challenge to Australia’s plain-packaging law for cigarettes and cigars at the WTO could have vast implications for how governments square the rules of trade with radical public health measures.

The case against Canberra has been spearheaded by cigar-producing nations Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Honduras, which say brandless packaging is an assault on their trading rights.

World Trade Organization chief Roberto Azevedo is expected within days to name a three-member panel of independent experts on the laws of commerce, who will then have six months to issue a ruling on whether Australia is out of line.

“Resolution of this dispute is critical because it will go a long way toward indicating whether the WTO will allow countries to take reasonable actions that are intended to protect the public’s health in an equitable and non-discriminatory fashion”, Michael Siegel, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, told AFP.

The WTO panel was authorised in late April by a closed-door meeting of its dispute settlement body.

The Geneva-based WTO ensures that its 159 member economies respect the rules of global commerce and its panels have the power to authorise counter-measures by the wronged countries, such as raising import tariffs on the guilty party’s goods.

An initial ruling would not be the end of the story, however, as the WTO dispute settlement process can grind on for years, amid appeals, counter-appeals and assessments of compliance with rulings.

Australia’s law was fought tooth and nail by the tobacco industry before and since its entry into force in December 2012.

But it is lauded by the World Health Organization and campaigners around the globe, who appreciate Canberra’s longstanding vanguard role in the fight against tobacco use — the leading global cause of preventable death, claiming six million lives a year worldwide.

– Key anti-smoking measure –

The legislation requires all tobacco products to be sold in drab green boxes, use the same typeface and contain graphic images of diseased smokers.

Canberra and its supporters argue that by hitting the industry’s branding power and by pushing stark messages, the law will help curb the number of smokers, notably young people who might otherwise take up the habit and thereby replenish the industry’s customer base.

“Tobacco plain packaging is a legitimate measure designed to achieve a fundamental objective: the protection of public health,” a spokesperson for Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told AFP.

“Australia will vigorously defend the challenges to tobacco plain packaging in the WTO. Australia is confident the tobacco plain packaging measure is consistent with WTO obligations,” the spokesperson said.

“Introducing tobacco plain packaging was the next logical step to restrict promotional material on tobacco products, closing one of the few remaining avenues for tobacco advertising in Australia.”

Australia maintains that because plain packaging treats all players equally, it does not constitute discrimination under the so-called TRIPS agreement covering trade and intellectual property rights.

The argument that the law breaches trademark rules also failed to convince the Australian High Court in a case brought by tobacco firms.

Canberra also accuses its rivals of dragging out the process of filing WTO complaints, thus discouraging other countries from adopting similar legislation until their compatability with trade rules is clear.

Plans to bring in plain packaging rules across the 28-nation European Union have been sluggish, but Britain, Ireland and New Zealand have now said they plan to forge ahead.

– ‘Detrimental to fair competition’ –

Honduras, Cuba and the Dominican Republic say the legislation harms their traditional cigar brands, thereby hurting farmers and hundreds of thousands of cigar-sector employees in the three countries.

“We will do everything we can in order to protect the jobs, export revenues and intellectual property rights that are invaluable to our developing economy,” said the Dominican Republic’s WTO ambassador, Luis Manuel Piantini.

“Plain packaging is not only an ineffective health policy, but also one that is detrimental to fair competition in the marketplace,” he added.

Fellow plaintiffs Indonesia and Ukraine, meanwhile, are both leading raw tobacco and cigarette exporters.

Analysts say the case tests the balance between TRIPS rules and measures that government argue are in the public interest, meaning a ruling could open a Pandora’s box of other cases.

TRIPS public interest exemptions have in the past been interpreted as being related to security or morals, rather than health or the environment, said Fredrik Erixon, director of the European Centre for International Political Economy.

“This is going to set a precedent,” he told AFP.

“What we’re talking about here is the extent to which a government actually can deny a company the right to communicate its own trademark, to distinguish its own goods from other goods.”

source: www.ndtv.com

 

Bacteria resistant to antibiotics have now spread to every part of the world and might lead to a future where minor infections could kill, according to a report published Wednesday by the World Health Organization.

In its first global survey of the resistance problem, WHO said it found very high rates of drug-resistant E. coli bacteria, which causes problems including meningitis and infections of the skin, blood and the kidneys. The agency noted there are many countries where treatment for the bug is useless in more than half of patients.

WHO’s report also found worrying rates of resistance in other bacteria, including common causes of pneumonia and gonorrhea.

Unless there is urgent action, “the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill,” Dr. Keiji Fukuda, one of the agency’s assistant director-generals, warned in a release.

WHO acknowledged it couldn’t assess the validity of the data provided by countries and that many had no information on antibiotic resistance available.

Health experts have long warned about the dangers of drug resistance, particularly in diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria and flu. In a report by Britain’s Chief Medical Officer last year, Dr. Sally Davies described resistance as a “ticking time bomb” and said it was as big a threat as terrorism.

In 1928, Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin revolutionized medicine by giving doctors the first effective treatment for a wide variety of infections. Despite the introduction of numerous other antibiotics since then, there have been no new classes of the drugs discovered for more than 30 years.

“We see horrendous rates of antibiotic resistance wherever we look…including children admitted to nutritional centers in Niger and people in our surgical and trauma units in Syria,” said Dr. Jennifer Cohn, a medical director at Doctors Without Borders, in a statement. She said countries needed to improve their monitoring of antibiotic resistance. “Otherwise, our actions are just a shot in the dark.”

WHO said people should use antibiotics only when prescribed by a doctor, that they should complete the full prescription and never share antibiotics with others or use leftover prescriptions.

source: latino.foxnews.com

The Health Ministry says an Indonesian citizen is suspected to have contracted the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus (MERS-CoV) and is now receiving a medical treatment at King Saud Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

“The Indonesian citizen has long been domiciled in Saudi Arabia and is not on an umroh (minor haj) pilgrim. The patient allegedly infected with the corona virus is being treated at King Saud Hospital, Jeddah, since April 20,” said the ministry’s director general of disease control and environmental health, Tjandra Yoga Aditama, in a statement in Jakarta on Tuesday, as quoted by Antara news agency.

There are no details on the current condition of the Indonesian, identified only by the initials NA, 61.

Tjandra said however, the ministry had continued to coordinate with related Saudi Arabian authorities to monitor the case.

“I talked directly to the Foreign Ministry’s director general for Asia-Pacific and Africa last night and have just been contacted by the Indonesian Ambassador in Saudi Arabia, confirming that there is a MERS-CoV-infected patient from Indonesia,” said Tjandra.

He said the ministry was closely monitoring the MERS-CoV cases that had been spreading in several Middle Eastern countries.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported that a number of MERS-CoV cases were found in Mecca and Medina, two main cities for hajj and umroh pilgrims in Saudi Arabia.

“For Indonesia, this becomes very crucial because many umroh pilgrims from Indonesia visit those two cities during the pilgrimage season,” said Tjandra.

Saudi Arabia’s Health Ministry said Sunday that eight more people have died after contracting the lethal virus related to SARS as the kingdom grapples with the rising number of cases, The Associated Press reported.

It said it had detected a total of 16 cases of the MERS-CoV over the past 24 hours. The latest cases bring the number of people who have died after contracting the disease in Saudi Arabia since September 2012 to102. To date a total of 339 cases have been recorded in the kingdom. (ebf)

source: www.thejakartapost.com