Polluted water affects residents of Cát Trinh Commune

Teachers and students at Cát Trinh Junior Secondary School had to endure bad smells from the Đồng Đế Channel over the past two months, said school principal Nguyễn Ngọc Trắc.—Photo baotainguyenmoitruong.vn

Teachers and students at Cát Trinh Junior Secondary School had to endure bad smells from the Đồng Đế Channel over the past two months, said school principal Nguyễn Ngọc Trắc.

The students even had to wear masks at school.

Polluted water from the channel seeped into the school well, which also took on the pungent odour.

“After discovering the well water was polluted, we asked the students to bring water from their homes to drink,” said Trắc.

The school has more than 800 students who use nearly 500 litres of water per day.

Residents of Cát Trinh Commune in Phù Cát District in the central province of Bình Định said the smell affected their daily lives.

Director of the Bình Định Department of Natural Resources and Environment Đặng Trung Thành said the department’s inspectors confirmed the channel water was polluted.

The department submitted a report to the provincial people’s committee and asked for help finding a solution.

Thành said the pollution came from the Cát Trinh Industrial Zone. With a total area of 16.7 ha, its primary investor is the Nhà Bè Garment Corporation Joint-stock Company. The zone houses the Phù Cát Garment Joint-stock Company, the Na Nu Printing Co Ltd and the Delta Galil Việt Nam Joint-stock Company.

The investor has not yet built a wastewater treatment system. Raw wastewater is collected and discharged into the environment.

Water samples taken from waste produced by Delta Galil Việt Nam had 1.6 times the allowed levels of pollutants.

Trần Châu, deputy chairman of the province people’s committee, said he recently signed a decision to fine Delta Galil Việt Nam nearly VNĐ300 million (US$13,000).

The company was suspended from its work for 135 days to improve the condition of local waterways.

Lương Văn Ngân, chairman of the Phù Cát District People’s Committee, said the district had discussed potential solutions with the provincial Department of Natural Resources and Environment.

Concerned organisations used samples of mud and water to develop a detailed treatment plan.

The district signed a contract with the Bình Định Water Supply and Sewage Joint-stock Company to supply water for local residents until the problem is resolved. 

Central city launches breast cancer awareness campaign

Patients wait for medical examinations at the Hoàn Mỹ-Đà Nẵng hospital. A breast cancer prevention and screening campaign was launched in the city. 

The Hoàn Mỹ-Đà Nẵng hospital has launched a breast cancer awareness campaign to promote early examination and screening among local residents and patients in the central and central highlands region.

The campaign, which will be held for three years, will offer free examinations for 100 poor people from October 20 to November 3, and provide breast cancer consultancy and information.

It also aims to encourage residents to have regular medical examinations and mammograms to prevent breast cancer as well as dismiss negative attitudes among patients about cancer.

According to Dr. Phạm Nguyễn Cẩm Thạch, director and CEO of Hoàn Mỹ-Đà Nẵng hospital, women are often scared about cancer, and breast cancer in particular, so hesitate to see doctors for pre-screening at hospital.

He said the hospital had launched an international clinic that can offer services for 1,200 local out-patients and foreign tourists in central Việt Nam each day.

According to the Ministry of Health, more than 22,000 people will be diagnosed with cancer in 2020 – 1.8 times higher than the 12,500 cases in 2010.

The central city alone hosted 62,000 people, of which 70 per cent were from 48 provinces and cities, for cancer examinations and 21,000 in-patients each year.

Đà Nẵng has 11 hospitals with 1,000 doctors, and more than 620 consulting rooms and medical care centres. 

Doctors fix five-month-old girl’s heart

A five-month-old baby with congenital heart disease recovers after undergoing heart surgery at Hoàn Mỹ-Đà Nẵng hospital. 

Doctors from Đà Nẵng-Hoàn Mỹ Hospital have successful operated on a five-month-old baby with congenital heart disease. The child is now fully recovered 10 days after surgery.

The hospital said the girl from Quảng Nam Province was diagnosed with a ventricular septal defect, or a hole in the heart, just a month after birth.

The girl then was taken to hospital for medical examinations in preparation for the heart operation in early October.

A team of doctors from the hospital successfully performed the operation on the young girl, and she is now healthy.

Doctors said she will soon be discharged from hospital.

The hospital offered the operation for free as the girl was from a poor household in the province.

According to the hospital, more than 9,000 children and teenagers in four central provinces and cities of Quảng Bình, Hà Tĩnh, Nghệ An and Đà Nẵng will be receiving free heart screening examinations following the hospital’s 2018 under-18 heart care programme.

Doctors said 116 children in the central region were diagnosed with congenital heart disease during the examinations in March, and they need surgeries later in 2018 with funding from donors and provincial children protection associations.

The city’s health department said 2,500 children under 18-years-old with heart disease in the central region have received free surgeries at the hospital since 2007. 

Gia Lai Province leprosy programme achieves great success

People with leprosy in Gia Lai Province receive unstinting support from authorities and medical workers.

The Central Highlands Province of Gia Lai is screening every household as part of its efforts to eradicate leprosy.

Patients can now get medical treatment at home and are not isolated unlike in the past. They also are taught how to take care of themselves to ensure the disease does not spread to others.

Authorities support patients with a monthly allowance, clothes and regular examination by doctors.

They are also building separate water tanks and community cultural houses for people with leprosy, and providing them with cattle, seeds and seedlings and fertilizers to earn a living.

The implementation of a leprosy prevention programme in ethnic minority villages has helped raise people’s awareness of the disease. People are assured the disease cannot be transmitted easily because there are medicines to cure it.

Đinh Hok, 60, of Jri Village in Chư Sê District’s Bờ Ngoong Commune, who was deserted by her family after she contracted the disease, said thanks to authorities’ support and doctors’ care, patients no longer feel abandoned.

Jri Village used to have many residents, but after leprosy broke out most people moved out and now only a few dozen people live there, most of them are abandoned women.

According to Nguyễn Đức Bảy, deputy director of the Chư Sê District health centre, in 1980s and 1990s people with leprosy were stigmatised and isolated, sometimes in forests.

"But this no longer occurs," he said.

Đình Giác, 89, a patient in Chư Sê District’s Quái village, said he used to live away from his family and community, but after the province began the programme he had been cured and reunited with his family.

The district had 80 patients, 70 of them disabled at the beginning of this year. But thanks to the programme, there are now only 10 patients who are getting treatment and do not threaten to transmit the disease.

The district health centre co-ordinates with related agencies to carry out screening programmes to detect new cases and provide timely treatment. It has detected no new cases this year.

The province has a total of 700 patients, including 550 disabled ones.

This year five new cases have been detected.

Smuggler of 5,000 drug pills arrested in Dien Bien

Smuggler Lo Thi Huong and the exhibits 

The border guard and customs force in the northern province of Dien Bien have captured a trafficker of 5,000 meth pills.

At 3:30 pm of October 23, a woman performing immigration procedure at the Tay Trang border check point was noticed with suspicious behaviours. The border guard checked her motor bike and found small packs hidden inside. The packs contained 5,000 pink-colored pills marked WY.

The woman was identified as Lo Thi Huong, born in 1975, a resident of the local Noong Luong commune in Dien Bien district.

She said she often travels to Laos for business and knows a person living in Laos’ Phongsaly province. 

She admitted that the Lao acquaintance helped her buy the drug at 2.5 million kips and that she was trying to smuggle the drug into Vietnam to sell for profits.

The case is under further investigation.

Vaccination is key to outbreak prevention: experts

Children with dengue fever at the Children 1 Hospital in HCM City (Photo: tuoitre.vn)

 Health experts have urged parents to have their babies fully vaccinated in order to create a barrier of immunisation for the whole community as several infectious diseases are raging across the country.

Measles was on the rise in the northern region with 3,000 cases and one death reported in 10 localities.

Meanwhile, in the hotter and more humid southern region where the number of measles cases steadily increased, outbreaks of hand-foot-and-mouth and dengue fever are showing little sign of slowing. More than 60,000 cases of hand-foot-and-mouth and approximately 67,000 cases of dengue fever have been recorded so far, with patients disproportionately living in the south. Ten were killed by those two diseases.

In an online Q&A session on preventive measures against infectious diseases held by the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper on October 23, Dr Nguyen Trong Toan, deputy head of the Disease Control and Prevention Department of the Ho Chi Minh Pasteur Institute, said that the key to protect a community from a disease was to make sure the vaccination coverage in that community reached a certain high percentage.

“Such a coverage rate combined with the effectiveness of the vaccines will build up a barrier of immunisation to protect the community from being disrupted by the disease or having it transmitted from one to another,” Toan said.

The measles virus, for example, exists in Vietnam throughout the year, he said. However, it will only break out in communities where the immunisation coverage failed to reach 95 percent.

That would explain why a majority of measles cases in the south concentrated in HCM City and Dong Nai and Binh Duong provinces -  the three localities attracted a large number of migrants and hence it was hard to control the vaccination coverage, Toan said.

“A dense, ever-changing population together with existing viruses and hot and humid climate will contribute to the spread of the diseases,” he said.

While infectious diseases can be transmitted to anyone, young children are always the most vulnerable due to their immature immune systems, said Dr Ngu Duy Nghia, head of the Department of Infectious Disease Control of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology.

The northern region of Vietnam was starting to enter winter with huge differences in temperature and humidity between days in a week or day and night, he said. That would bring along potential outbreaks of particular diseases like flu, measles, rubella, chicken pox and mumps.

“It is of the utmost importance to have the children vaccinated against those diseases in line with the vaccination schedule,” Nghia said, especially as many vaccines are already provided free through the national vaccination programme.

With diseases like hand-foot-and-mouth or dengue fever, for which vaccines are not yet available in Vietnam, he advised families to pay more attention to personal hygiene by washing hands with soap several times a day and regularly sterilising the children’s utilities and toys. To avoid dengue, people should take care to limit exposure to mosquitoes.

Parents should also refrain from bringing their children to crowded places to reduce the chance of catching a disease, especially when they are not fully vaccinated, Nghĩa said. 

Conference spotlights open education in human resource development

At the event

The 32nd annual conference of the Asian Association of Open Universities (AAOU) opened in Hanoi on October 24, bringing together about 400 delegates from 20 countries and territories worldwide.

Themed “Open Education in Human Resource Development for Asia in Period of Integration,” the conference provides a platform for academics and administrators to exchange views and experiences in open and distance learning. Some 270 presentations have been submitted to share study findings and hands-on experience on the importance of open and distance learning in Asia’s human resource development in integration.

The event, which runs through October 26, is expected to foster research in open and distance learning and pave the way for expanding partnership among educational institutions in the region and the world.

It will address the following sub-themes - Human Resource Development in Open Universities; Open Education in Technical, Vocational, and Skills Development; Education Practices in Foreign Languages and Academic Disciplines; and New Technologies in Open Education – during six parallel sessions.

In his opening remarks, Deputy Minister of Education and Training Nguyen Van Phuc said against the backdrop of today’s globalisation and international integration, each country is required to have a competent workforce that meets international standards. They must be daring and have knowledge on and interest in foreign culture, as well as good communication and foreign language skills, he noted.

He spoke highly of the conference’s theme and expected presentations and ideas delivered at the event will lay a basis for further developing educational methods, programmes and systems to facilitate the provision of skilled workers who can keep up with the growing trend of globalisation in all sectors.

Founded in 1987, the AAOU is a non-profit organisation of higher learning institutions that are primarily concerned with open and distance education. It strives to widen the educational opportunities available to all people in Asia, improve the quality of the institutions in terms of their educational management, teaching and research, and promote education by distance teaching systems.

Hanoi Open University has been a member of the AAOU for 18 years that have expanded cooperation with a number of member institutions. The University hosted the 24th AAOU conference in 2010. 

More than 11,500 hectares of forests planted in Tuyen Quang

The northern mountainous province of Tuyen Quang planted additional 11,565 hectares of forest from the outset of this year, or 103.3 percent of the set target for the whole year 

The northern mountainous province of Tuyen Quang planted additional 11,565 hectares of forest from the outset of this year, or 103.3 percent of the set target for the whole year, according to deputy head of the forest protection bureau under the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development Trieu Dang Khoa.

Afforestation in the districts of Yen Son, Son Duong and Chiem Hoa exceeded the assigned tasks, he said.

To attain the results, the agriculture department directed communal People’s Committees and forestry companies to accelerate land clearance for forest plantation. The forest protection bureau worked with competent authorities to ensure the sufficiency of quality seedlings. Meanwhile, forestry firms had taken rational measures to mobilise capital and enhance linkages to fulfill their target.

Furthermore, local communication campaigns have been carried out across the province to raise public awareness of the roles and values of forests, thus attracting investments from various economic sectors.

Besides planting high-quality varieties in an area of over 1,000 hectares, the province’s forestry sector is expanding forest areas receiving sustainable forest management certificate from the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC certificate. It is now home to more than 16,000 hectares of forest granted with FSC certificates, and is targeting another 4,000 hectares certified to be of the FSC standard this year.

Tuyen Quang has a forest coverage rate of 60 percent, one of the highest in the country.

Joint efforts made to combat cross-border smuggling

At the conference 

Competent forces have stepped up coordination in preventing and combating smuggling via borders in the central provinces of Ha Tinh, Quang Binh and Quang Tri, heard a conference in Dong Ha city, Quang Tri province, on October 24. 

Thanks to joint efforts by the Anti-Smuggling Department under the General Department of Vietnam Customs, the Border Guard High Command’s Drug and Crime Prevention Department, and steering boards 389 of the three provinces from August 21 to October 21, 2018, a number of smuggling cases were brought to trials.  

A total of 555 smuggling cases were detected in the localities over the past two months, including 57 in Ha Tinh, 268 in Quang Binh and 230 in Quang Tri. Criminal proceedings have been launched against 21 cases. 

Delegates made proposals to raise the efficiency of the fight against cross-border smuggling, which, they said, needs more funding and modern machines to serve control at border areas and border gates. 

They also suggested improving the role of local authorities in encouraging locals to combat smuggling and promote the efficiency of hotlines.

Medical supervision vital for IV therapy

Intravenous therapy is a popular medical technique but can pose risks, even fatal ones

 

Patients taking intravenous therapy must strictly follow their doctor’s prescription to minimise possible side effects, doctors affirmed after recent tragedies have illustrated the dangers of intravenous medicines.

Most recently, on October 16, a 22-month-old baby in Yen Thuong commune in Hanoi’s Gia Lam district died after having an intravenous drip at a private clinic in Long Bien district.

Before being taken to the clinic, the baby suffered from diarrhea and fever. Within only five minutes of starting intravenous therapy, the baby showed signals of anaphylactic shock.

Nguyen Quang Trung, head of the private healthcare management division under the Hanoi Heath Department, said that the clinic was not licensed to provide the intravenous service.

A 6-year-old girl in the northern city of Hai Phong reportedly died in the middle of this month after taking an intravenous drip at Le Chan district General Hospital.

In April, the death of a 48-year-old teacher in the Central Highlands Province of Dak Lak was also related to intravenous therapy carried out at a private clinic.

The recent fatalities have raised the alarm on the substandard practice of intravenous therapies.

Intravenous therapy (IV) is a therapy that delivers liquid substances directly into a vein. The intravenous route of administration can be used for injections or infusions. Intravenous infusions are commonly referred to as drips.

With the availability of medical products and healthcare practitioners, people in Vietnam, especially in urban areas, nowadays can easily access an emerging medical service that offers intravenous therapy at home.

The convenience of the service has made more and more people prefer to seek an intravenous drip as soon as they feel unwell. Instead of going to see a doctor at reliable healthcare centres or hospital, they seek the treatment at freelance healthcare practitioners, private clinics and even uncertified providers.

Nguyen Thi Nga, 60, of Tay Ho district, Hanoi said that whenever she or other members in her family feel exhaustion, fatigue and loss of appetite, she immediately thought about intravenous therapy as a way to re-hydrate and ingest nutrients.

She said that she thought the practice would help improve their health and stop illness.

“In many cases, I feel better after taking the intravenous drip,” she said.

More notably, Nga said she had met the health care practitioner who offered the service through her acquaintances and she did not know exactly which hospital he worked for or whether or not he graduated from a medical school.

Associate Professor and Dr Nguyen Tien Dung from Bach Mai Hospital said that intravenous therapy was a popular medical technique but could pose risks, even fatal ones.

“Intravenous therapy cannot be used for every one and should not always be the first option,” he said, adding that almost all medical and liquid substances used for intravenous therapy could have unexpected side effects.

“Intravenous therapy must follow a doctor’s prescription based on test results and the patient’s health conditions,” he said.

The technique must be carried out at certificated health care units and strictly controlled by health care providers who could address unexpected situations in a timely manner.

“It’s very dangerous if someone has an intravenous drip without doctors’ prescription and control because they feel tired or a loss of appetite, they could be experiencing the symptoms of a more serious illness,” he said.

He added that the misuse of the therapy could cause serious complications, such as for children suffering from pneumonia or heart diseases.

Hà Nam announces tourism master plan

Authorities in the northern province of Hà Nam have announced a master plan for tourism development by 2030.

The master plan, issued at a conference held recently in the province, aims to develop it into a tourism hub in the Red River Delta.

Basing on its geological and regional conditions, the province’s tourism offerings will include innovative tourism resort products associated with science and technology, along with festivals and spiritual, cultural and historical relics.

Tam Chúc National Tourism Complex in Kim Bảng District will be the focus with development prioritised over an area of 4,000 hectares in Ba Sao Town and three villages of Vồng, Khuyến Công and Khả Phong in Khả Phong Commune.

The site, together with its adjacent tourism clusters, is expected to form an attractive tourism centre of the Red River Delta, the north-east coastal region and the nation at large by 2030, under a master plan approved earlier by Prime Minister Nguyễn Xuân Phúc.

By 2020, Hà Nam tourism aims to have 2.5-3 million tourists annually, including 190,000 foreigners.

It is expected to welcome about 3.7 million visitors by 2025, of whom 470,000 are expected to be foreigners. The respective figures will be 6 million and 750,000 five years later.

By 2030, the province targets to increase the number of tourist arrivals to 7.6 million.

Total revenue from tourism in the province is expected to reach VNĐ2 trillion (US$86 million) by 2020 and VNĐ10.3 trillion ($441 million) by 2030, or an annual average increase of 10-15 per cent, creating jobs for 21,000 local people, including over 8,300 direct employees.

The development master plan aims to ensure consistency with relevant strategies and plans which have been approved by authorities to exploit the province’s potential strength and characteristic values.

It says tourism development should be implemented closely along with the preservation of natural resources and environment, ensuring the livelihoods of local people and the restructuring of employment to increase income, making the most of local labour resources to serve the tourism industry.

The plan promotes a close connection between tourist resorts and tourist sites in the Red River Delta and the northeastern coast as well as among the northern key economic zones and the southern tourist areas of Hà Nam to safeguard the national security and defence and to meet the demands of socio-economic development.

The Director of the Hà Nam Department of Culture, Sports and Tourism, Lê Xuân Huy, said the provincial People’s Committee approval to the master plan had created momentum for the province’s tourism industry to take off and develop into an important economic sector.

“It will help promote the province’s industrial development, boost trading and develop others sectors such as health, science, education, high-quality agriculture and manufacturing industries in the province,” said the official.