Vietnamese church group meets at Da Nang

The General Confederation of the Vietnam United World Mission convened its second general conference in central Da Nang city on August 10.

Almost 700 pastors, missionaries and leaders of the congregations in 14 southern provinces and cities and Christians attended the two-day event.
Deputy Head of the Government Committee for Religious Affairs Bui Thanh Ha highlighted the religious group’s active involvement in hunger eradication and poverty reduction and building families of new cultural styles, as well as charitable activities.
Pastor Nguyen Toi, the Head of the Mission, thanked the authorities for facilitating the mission’s activities during the 2007-2011 term.
During the past five years, the group provided VND200 million to help poor families and Agent Orange and flood victims nationwide.
The church will continue carrying out its religious activities in line with the law in the next term, said the pastor.
The Vietnam United World Mission was founded in Da Nang on September 1, 1956 and granted a certificate of religious practice by the Government Committee for Religious Affairs on its 50th anniversary.

A woman in Quang Tri Province who allegedly borrowed around VND100 billion (US$5 million) from individuals and banks and disappeared a month ago has given herself up to police.
Since last month dozens of local people had reported that Nguyen Thi Lan Anh, director of Thai Bao JSC, and her husband Cao Xuan Thien had swindled them, the local economic crimes police said.
Colonel Bui Van Ly, head of the Economic Crime Investigation Police Department, said the police are questioning Anh and hunting for Thien, the company chairman.
The victims said the couple lured them to lend them money at high interest rates but they later did not pay his debts.
Also falling victim were a local branch of VietinBank and the Quang Binh Branch of VPBank, which had lent VND39 billion and VND29 billion respectively.
The heads of the two branches had confirmed the loans, police said.
VPBank has sealed off Lan Anh Hotel that was mortgaged for the loan.

More 220 Long Thanh households get Vedan compensation

More 220 households in Long Thanh District in southern Dong Nai Province yesterday, Aug 10, were given pollution compensation money of about VND800 million (US$38,400) from the Taiwanese company Vedan.
According to Long Thanh District Farmers' Association, these households are from Phuoc Thai and Long Phuoc communes, where the river's water was proven seriously polluted, affecting local farmers' businesses as Vedan directly discharged untreated waste water into the Thi Vai river for years.
Vedan has completed transferring the total compensation amount of VND120 billion ($5.7 million) to the Farmers' Associations of Long Thanh and Nhon Trach districts, where nearly 6,000 households whose cultivated land and aquaculture breeding were affected.
Last January, the two districts had transferred the compensation of about VND40 billion ($1.9 million) to affected households. As planned, the second payout will be held this month for the rest of affected families.
In September 2008, Vedan Viet Nam was caught discharging untreated wastewater into Thi Vai River in southern Dong Nai province, causing serious pollution and heavy losses to thousands of fish-rearing households in Dong Nai, Ba Ria-Vung Tau and HCM City.
It turned out that the company had been doing it for 14 years.

The HCM City Department of Health will co-operate with the Department of Education and Training to train teachers and school management staffs on ways to prevent the spread of dengue fever and hand-foot-mouth disease as the new school year opens on August 15.

At a monthly meeting between the department leaders and officials of health centres in the city's districts, Nguyen Dac Tho, deputy head of the City Preventive Medicine Centre, said that students' parents would also be provided with information to raise awareness and destroy mosquito larvae in their homes.

Both teachers and parents would be encouraged to keep their hands, as well as that of their children, clean at all times with regular washing with soap; and the floor and toys used by children would be disinfected regularly as preventive measures against HFMD, Tho said.

Moreover, district health centres would be asked to focus preventive measures on areas with a lot of renters and with increasing numbers of residents afflicted with either disease, he said.

According to the City Preventive Medicine Centre, 1,249 patients contracted dengue fever in July, an increase of 40 per cent over June. Fortunately, there were no fatalities.

The number of wards and communes in the city with residents afflicted by the disease in July also increased 12.4 per cent compared to June. Most of the patients were in districts 7, 8, Tan Binh, Binh Chanh, Binh Tan and Tan Phu.

The total number of dengue fever patients in the first seven months of the year was 5,965, double that of the same period last year. There were two deaths.

Meanwhile, the number of patients with HFMD last month reduced overall, but increased in some districts like Binh Tan and Tan Binh.

In July, 1,882 patients were diagnosed with HFMD, a decrease of 10 per cent over June. Five patients died, raising the death toll in the first seven months to 22.

The total number of HFMD patients recorded since the beginning of this year is 6,646.

Chinese toys dominate Mid-Autumn lantern market

Vietnamese traditional lanterns are giving way to Chinese plastic ones, which are dominating the toy market for the upcoming Mid-Autumn festival with various eye-catching designs and competitive prices.
Although the children’s moon fest is still a month ahead, Ho Chi Minh City is already flooded with Chinese plastic lanterns, while the traditional, hand-made domestic toys can only be found in a few shops based in District 5 and 11 as most of them have switched to selling the modern lanterns.
A shop on Hai Thuong Lan Ong Street, District 5, for instance, used to sell only domestic traditional lanterns but it is now full of imported plastic ones.
Many sellers said Chinese lanterns could enjoy better sales thanks to their diversified shapes and reasonable prices.
“Chinese plastic lanterns could easily win children’s heart as they could make movements and produce lights and sounds while the traditional ones are limited to a few number of shapes like chicken, rabbit, star or boat,” Thuy Vy, a children toy wholesaler in District 6 said, adding that Chinese lantern prices are between VND20,000 and VND40,000 (US$1-2) a product.
She added that since the toys are made of plastic, they could be re-used or re-sold during next year’s fest.
“But we cannot do so with Vietnamese lanterns since they are made of cellophane, which is easily torn,” she added.
However, most of the Chinese lanterns available on the market do not bear quality assurance stamps and, therefore could cause harm to children as they could have been made of poor quality and toxic plastic.
The invasion of Chinese modern lanterns has threatened the existence of the traditional craft of making paper lantern.
At the Phu Binh parish in Ward 5, District 11, where there used to be as many as a hundred households making traditional paper lanterns, for instance, there are now only 15 households still doing the craft.
The lantern makers said they had to give up due to soaring input costs and low sales.
Vietnamese lantern prices now range from VND10,000 to VND70,000, which many makers said have made paper lanterns less competitive than Chinese plastic ones.
Pham Manh Dang, 61, who has been making paper lantern for more than 35 years, said they [lantern makers] have accepted small profits to keep the tradition.
“But some have given up as they could not make ends meet with this craft,” he said sadly.

Tien Giang to build 500 storm shelters

The southern province of Tien Giang plans to spend VND3.9 billion (US$186,000) on building 500 storm shelters for local households, said Nguyen Thien Phap, director of the Department of Irrigation and Flood and Storm Prevention.

The 10sq.m shelters will provide refuge for poor householders in the coastal districts of Go Cong Dong and Tan Phu Dong.

They will have a toilet, be made from reinforced concrete, and cost about VND7.8 million ($375) each to build.

The department said there were about 30,000 households in the two districts who needed to be relocated during heavy storms.

Building suspended at resettlement area

The Ha Noi People's Committee has approved a plan to suspend the building of the Nguyen Du-Le Duan resettlement area in Hai Ba Trung District.

The project, involving residents on Nguyen Du street and Hang Long alley, was approved by the committee in 1998.

The investor, Investing and Trading Real Estate Joint Stock Company, said it had completed the first phase of the project, but, due to a shortage of capital, could not go ahead with the second phase.

The resettlement area belongs to State-owned Ha Noi Housing Development and Management One-Member Limited Company.

The committee ordered both companies to resolve issues relating to residents who had rented houses that were part of the project.

Foreign investors eye Vietnam’s health sector

With its large population, Vietnam is recognised as a potential market offering many opportunities for foreign investors in the health sector.

The comment was made by Allan Yeo, Chief Executive of the Happy Hospital under Singapore’s Thomson Medical Centre, which is planning to expand investment in Vietnam.
In comparison with finance, securities and real estate, the health sector remains less lively in the panorama of foreign investment in Vietnam.
Dau Tu (Investment) newspaper on August 8 said that foreign investment in Vietnam’s health sector has picked up with information on the Indian group Fortis Healthcare intending to buy 50 percent of shares of Ho Chi Minh City’s Hoan My Medical Group through an agreement worth 100 million USD.
If successful, the transaction would help Fortis Healthcare to increase its presence in Asia, where the Economist Magazine’s EIU forecast the per capita expenditure for health services to increase by 55 percent in the 2010-2015 period.
Many foreign investors have operated effectively in Vietnam’s health sector and expanded their scale of operation, for example with the Vien Dong Co. Ltd, investing more in the France-Vietnam Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City and the Thomson Medical Centre in Happy Hospital.
According to Allan Yeo, among foreign investors, Singapore is considered the country with the greatest potential.
Recently, Parkway Health of Singapore, Asia’s leading private medical group, entered the Vietnamese market through a Hoa Lam-Shangri-La joint venture to become the manager of the HCM City high-tech health centre.

VNN/VOV/VNS/Tuoi Tre