With a likely “explosion” of swine flu in the coming months, a leading WHO official has urged China to distribute vaccines to needy nations to help contain the disease.
“We would greatly welcome an initiative by the Chinese government to support developing and needy countries in a fair distribution of this vaccine,” Shin Young-soo, WHO’s regional director for the Western Pacific, said in a statement received late on Friday.
Shin’s remarks came after Chinese Health Minister Chen Zhu (陳竺) reported on China’s efforts to develop a vaccine for the A(H1N1) virus at a symposium on swine flu in the Asia-Pacific region.
Shin warned the virus was entering an “acceleration period” and predicted more deaths and more cases as the “pandemic will get worse before the situation gets better.”
“Most countries may see a doubling of cases every three to four days for two months until peak transmission is reached,” Shin told the symposium on Friday. “At a certain point, there will seem to be an explosion in case numbers. I believe it is very likely that all countries will see community-level transmission by the end of the year.”
About 1,800 people have died since the A(H1N1) virus was first uncovered in April, according to the latest update from the WHO issued this week. The vast majority of those deaths have been recorded in the Americas.
The WHO said earlier this week that countries in the northern hemisphere alone had ordered more than 1 billion doses of swine flu vaccine, sparking warnings about shortages, given the intense demand and production delays.
A Chinese drug company, Sinovac Biotech, this week announced positive preliminary data from its clinical trials after giving test subjects just one dose of its vaccine.
“We are also very encouraged by preliminary but promising results from the clinical trials of H1N1 vaccine,” Shin said of the Chinese vaccine.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RESTRUCTURE: Myanmar’s military has ended emergency rule and announced plans for elections in December, but critics said the move aims to entrench junta control Myanmar’s military government announced on Thursday that it was ending the state of emergency declared after it seized power in 2021 and would restructure administrative bodies to prepare for the new election at the end of the year. However, the polls planned for an unspecified date in December face serious obstacles, including a civil war raging over most of the country and pledges by opponents of the military rule to derail the election because they believe it can be neither free nor fair. Under the restructuring, Myanmar’s junta chief Min Aung Hlaing is giving up two posts, but would stay at the
RSS