asia healthspace

Today, I stumbled upon a new, very interesting blog concept started by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky, addressing scientific journalism and its accuracy: Retraction Watch. In the pursuit of accountability you have to love the web enabling blogs and organizations like this, Wikileaks, and other independent forms of investigative journalism and expression. Old school media [...]

Printed with permission. Source: EIU Healthcare Report December 2009 Provision of healthcare in Vietnam is respectable in terms of health indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality but the poor provision of health services in rural areas is reflected in the health equitability rankings from the WHO, which puts Vietnam 183 out of 194 [...]

Printed with permission. Source: EIU Healthcare Report September 2009 Indonesia remains one of the poorest countries in South-east Asia, and the quality of healthcare available is low and subject to considerable regional inequalities. Healthcare spending in Indonesia is low by regional standards, accounting for 2.7% of GDP in 2008, compared with 3.3% in Thailand and [...]

Most doctors are damn good people; saints really (NO sarcasm intended). They are society’s ultimate deliberate and personally committed altruists and are the only profession that I know that has officially and internationally codified their morals/ethics values. So it with this premise in mind that I mark the question in the title after reading this [...]

Printed with permission. Source: EIU Healthcare Report December 2009 Recent increases in health expenditure have been a result of rising incomes, the growing incidence of prosperity-related chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, and the rapid ageing of the population. In 2009 healthcare spending per head in Taiwan was estimated at US$1,074, and total healthcare spending [...]

Printed with permission. Source: EIU Healthcare Report October 2009 Healthcare spending is low by OECD standards and a rapidly ageing population will put further pressure on the system Total healthcare spending in South Korea is among the lowest in the OECD, at an estimated US$971 per head in 2009, or about 6% of GDP—compared with [...]

This is just BIZARRE on so many different levels….. 2-year-old boy smokes 40 cigarettes a day BEIJING, May 30 — Taking a deep drag on his cigarette while resting on the steering wheel of his truck, he looks like a parody of a middle-aged lorry driver. But the image covers up a much more disturbing [...]

Printed with permission. Source: EIU Healthcare Report November 2009 While improving, healthcare provision in India is still characterised by huge inequalities. India spent an estimated 5% of GDP on healthcare in 2009. This is more than neighbouring Pakistan (which spent 2.4% of GDP on healthcare), and China (4.7%), but far less than the G7 average [...]

Printed with permission. Source: EIU Healthcare Report January 2010 As China has developed, healthcare spending has risen, leading to an improvement in health indicators. A massive reform programme is now under way. As with most other economic indicators, healthcare spending in China has risen rapidly, increasing from US$1.7bn in 1980 to US$208bn in 2008. Nevertheless, [...]

Interesting article Medco Expands Push to Better Match Patients to Drugs With Genetic Testing posted in Seeking Alpha by Michael Fitzhugh from The Burrill Report. Quick quote: “Medco, which already uses genetic testing to help guide usage of the blood thinner warfarin and the breast cancer drug tamoxifen, in February acquired the San Francisco-based genetic [...]

As you can see from the chart previously posted “Emerging leading causes of death in emerging Asia”, cardiovascular diseases now rank as the #1 or #2 leading cause of death in all Asian countries and is clearly a major growing health concern in the developing world having already conquered the developed world. This is largely [...]