ျပည္ပအိမ္ၿခံေျမသတင္းမ်ား

A historic house in Aomori Prefecture supposedly used as a ninja base hundreds of years ago has avoided demolition after its new owner vowed to preserve the property, a university professor said Tuesday. The wooden one-story house, which sits in a narrow alley in the city of Hirosaki, had faced the risk of demolition, after the couple that owned it for about 30 years decided to sell it due to its high maintenance costs. However, the house was bought for about ¥20 million by Mitsumaro Sato, a 63-year-old Hirosaki city official, who has agreed to preserve the house and use it to pass on ninja history and culture, according to Shigeto Kiyokawa, a professor at Aomori University who also...

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Malaysia has been given priority recipient status for a Chinese-produced Covid-19 vaccine once it is developed, says Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein. The Foreign Minister said the country appreciated China's commitment to prioritise Malaysia for any Covid-19 vaccine. "We welcome China's agreement to encourage Chinese enterprises to establish all-round cooperation with Malaysian partners in vaccine research and development, and distribution," said Hishammuddin during a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday (Oct 13). Hishammuddin and Wang earlier had a face-to-face talk followed by a bilateral meeting at the hotel. He said...

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Doctors will finally trial whether vitamin D can actually protect people from Covid-19 amid mounting evidence the 3p-a-day supplement could be a life-saver. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London will recruit 5,000 volunteers to take the vitamin for six months if they do not already take high doses. Experts will then assess whether participants are at less risk of catching the virus and developing a severe bout of the disease over the winter months. A mountain of studies have found an overwhelming amount of people who test positive for Covid-19 do not have enough vitamin D in their bodies and the sickest of patients are often deficient. Britons are most at risk of being...

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The clinical trial of an experimental Chinese COVID-19 vaccine developed by Sinovac Biotech in Bangladesh is now uncertain as the health ministry refused to co-financing the initiative as requested by the Chinese drugmaker. Sinovac Biotech Ltd in a letter on September 24 said the trial would be delayed unless the government provided funds, although the company was supposed to bear the costs as per an agreement, The Daily Star reported. BDnews24 quoted Health Minister Zahid Maleque as saying that Sinovac should run the trial with their own money because that’s what they said they would do when they had sought approval. “(And) that’s why they were given permission,”...

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The World Health Organization has warned leaders against relying on COVID-19 lockdowns to tackle outbreaks — after previously saying countries should be careful how quickly they reopen. WHO envoy Dr. David Nabarro said such restrictive measures should only be treated as a last resort, the British magazine the Spectator reported in a video interview. “We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,” Nabarro said. “The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d...

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A 25-year-old was infected twice with the coronavirus earlier this year, scientists in Nevada have confirmed. It is the first confirmed case of so-called reinfection with the virus in the U.S. and the fifth confirmed reinfection case worldwide. The cases underscore the importance of social distancing and wearing masks even if you were previously infected with the virus, and they raise questions about how the human immune system reacts to the virus. The two infections in the Nevada patient occurred about six weeks apart, according to a case study published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet. The patient originally tested positive for the virus in April and had symptoms including a...

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  AstraZeneca has secured $486 million from the U.S. government to fund two phase 3 clinical trials of its anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody cocktail AZD7442. The larger of the two studies will assess the ability of the long-acting antibodies to prevent infection with the pandemic coronavirus for up to 12 months. Many early discussions of the role of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in the COVID-19 pandemic centered on their therapeutic potential. AstraZeneca, while interested in the therapeutic use of antibodies, has consistently talked up the role the drugs can play in preventing people from catching the virus and developing COVID-19, particularly in populations that may be poorly served by...

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  The Chinese port city of Qingdao plans to test some nine million people in the coming five days, after 12 locally-transmitted coronavirus cases were reported sparking concerns of a wider outbreak. China has been largely coronavirus free since mid-August, with all cases reported by the country imported from elsewhere. But as of October 11, Qingdao has reported a dozen locally transmitted cases, all of which have been linked to a hospital treating imported infections, the city's Municipal Health Commission said in a statement Monday. Mass testing has already been carried out at the Qingdao Chest Hospital, which has been placed on lockdown, with 114,862 people, staff and patients,...

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Almost two million babies are stillborn every year - one every 16 seconds - the United Nations said Thursday (Oct 8), warning that the COVID-19 pandemic could add another 200,000 deaths to the "devastating" toll. The vast majority of stillbirths, 84 per cent, occur in low- and middle-income countries, where basic neo-natal care could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year, according to a joint report by UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the World Bank Group. Most stillbirths occur due to poor quality healthcare lacking investment in equipment and training of midwives. And unlike notable reductions in recent decades in the global rate of maternal and infant deaths,...

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“I was concerned that I might get infected. Everyone was afraid,” says 32-year-old World Health Organization (WHO) data collector Myat Mon Yee. Since March, Ms. Mon Yee, a computer studies graduate from South Dagon Township in Yangon, has been working at the South Okkalapa Hospital in the former capital. The hospital was planned as the Women’s and Children's Hospital but has been transformed into a COVID-19 treatment centre. Not surprisingly, she was initially quite concerned about working with an infectious disease about which very little was known, except that it was killing people and making others very sick: front line health workers throughout the world have been...

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