China to stop harvesting organs from executed prisoners

By 

MICHELLE CASTILLO

China will begin phasing out a program that allowed the harvesting of organs from prisoners who were executed, a senior Chinese official told Reuters on Friday.

Former deputy health minister Huang Jiefu, who still heads the ministry's organ transplant office, said that in the future, organs would be only be taken from volunteers who submitted their request to be donors through the new national organ donation system, which is called the China Organ Transplant Committee.

"I am confident that before long all accredited hospitals will forfeit the use of prisoner organs," Huang said.

There are currently 165 Chinese hospitals that perform transplants. Huang said the first batch of hospitals -- he didn't say how many -- will end the practice of using prisoners' organs following a meeting on the issue this November.

About 300,000 patients are wait-listed each year for an organ in China. Only one in 30 will receive a transplant.

Voluntary donations remain low because many Chinese people follow beliefs that oppose organ removal before burial. Huang said in 2010 there were only 63 cases of voluntary organ donation. This year, the country has averaged 130 donations per month, but it's still not nearly enough to meet demand.

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New bird flu deadlier than swine flu

 

 Posted  By: Neill Abayon

The H7N9 bird flu virus, first identified in humans earlier this year, kills about 36% of infected people admitted to hospitals in China, according to a new report published Sunday in the British medical journal The Lancet.

Far more difficult to estimate, according to the study, is how many die in the general population after becoming infected, as the most severe cases are also more likely to lead to hospitalization.

That estimate – a 0.16% to 2.8% overall fatality rate for those showing symptoms of infection – suggests that the H7N9 virus is less deadly than the H5N1 Bird Flu first appearing in 2003, and more deadly than the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic.

Others infected with the virus may never show symptoms.

“There’s almost always a large portion of asymptomatic (flu virus) cases, and cases where infected people don’t seek treatment,” says Dr. Gabriel Leung, one of the study's authors and head of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

Read the full article here.

MSG Use Is Linked to Obesity

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Consumption of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, the widely used food additive, may increase the likelihood of being overweight, a new study says.

Researchers studied 752 men and women in three villages in northern and southern China where most people use little commercially processed food, but where about 80 percent of people add MSG in cooking.

After controlling for body mass index, smoking, physical activity and almost two dozen measures of daily nutrient intake, they found that the one-third of people who used the most MSG were almost three times as likely to be overweight — that is, to have a body mass index over 25 — as those who used none. On average, with each 0.04-ounce daily increase in MSG intake, B.M.I. went up by 0.61.

MSG makes food taste better, which may lead people to eat more, but the researchers controlled for total energy intake so it is unlikely that that explains the finding. The mechanism for the connection, published in the August issue of Obesity, remains unclear.

Dr. Ka He, the lead author and an assistant professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the University of North Carolina, said the study established an association, not a causal relationship.

“MSG is not toxic,” he said. “But now the question is: Is it healthy? This study is a warning that we should be cautious.”

See the full article here.