Cambodia bans human breast milk exports to US

Yahoo – AFP, March 28, 2017

Cambodia temporarily halted breast milk exports by Utah-based Ambrosia Labs,
which claimed to be the first firm to source the product from overseas and
distribute it in the US (AFP Photo/Raul ARBOLEDA)

Phnom Penh (AFP) - Cambodia officially banned selling and exporting locally-pumped human breast milk Tuesday, after reports exposed how women were turning to the controversial trade to boost meagre incomes in one of Southeast Asia's poorest countries.

The order comes after Cambodia temporarily halted breast milk exports by Utah-based Ambrosia Labs, which claims to be the first firm to source the product from overseas and distribute it in the United States.

The milk was pumped by poor Cambodian women in the capital Phnom Penh and then shipped to the US, where it was pasteurised and sold for $20 per 5 oz (147 ml) pack.

The company's customers are American mothers who want to supplement their babies' diets or cannot produce enough milk of their own.

On Tuesday, Cambodia's cabinet ordered the health ministry to "take actions to immediately prevent the purchasing and exporting of breast milk from mothers from Cambodia," according to a letter seen by AFP.

"Although Cambodia is poor and (life is) difficult, it is not at the level that it will sell breast milk from mothers," it added.

Cambodia's cabinet has ordered the health ministry to "take actions to immediately

 prevent the purchasing and exporting of breast milk from mothers from Cambodia," 

according to a letter seen by AFP (AFP Photo/Fred DUFOUR)

Ambrosia Labs has defended its business in previous interviews, saying the model encouraged Cambodian women to continue breast feeding, earned them much needed extra income and helped fill milk bank shortages in the US.

But UNICEF -- the arm of the UN protecting children -- welcomed the ban, saying the trade was exploitative and that excess breast milk should remain in Cambodia, where many babies lack proper nutrition.

"In Cambodia exclusive breastfeeding for newborns for their first six months declined from 75 per cent in 2010 to 65 per cent in 2014," Debora Comini, UNICEF's Cambodia Representative said in a statement.

Ros Sopheap, the director of the local women's rights group Gender and Development for Cambodia (GDC), applauded the government's decision to bar the trade.

"Even if women agree to do it voluntarily, they often have no other choices and face economic pressure," she told AFP.

Chea Sam, a 30-year-old mother who once worked for Ambrosia Labs, told AFP in a recent interview that she had been selling her breast milk for three months after the birth of her son.

She said she earned $7.5-$10 a day and she knew at least 20 other mothers doing the same.

"We are regretful that this trade has been banned. It had helped our livelihood a lot," she told AFP after the exports were initially suspended.

Wee are not amused: $40k toilet for Thai princess unflushed

Yahoo – AFP, 23 February 2016 

Thai Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn and Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen walk

 past honor guards upon her arrival at the Peace Palace in Phnom Penh on 

February 22, 2016 (AFP Photo/Tang Chhin Sothy)

A luxury commode custom-built for a Thai princess's visit to Cambodia was left unused despite its hefty $40,000 price tag, local officials said Tuesday, in a poor country where the majority of rural dwellers do not have access to a toilet.

The convenience was built for a visit on Monday by Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn to Yeak Lom lake in northeastern Cambodia.

But her two-hour visit ended without her ever having experienced the lavish water closet, community leader Ven Churk told AFP.

The toilet was later "removed" and the adjoining bathroom will now be turned into a security post for tourists visiting the tree-ringed lake, he added.

"She (the Princess) did not go inside the bathroom, she just looked at it from outside and took some pictures," he said.

The toilet took more than two weeks to build and cost an estimated $40,000, Ven Churk told AFP.

Thai princess gets $40K toilet built for Cambodia  …Play videoThai princess gets $40K toilet built for Cambodia  …
"I have never seen such a bathroom," he said.

Provincial governor Nhem Sam Oeun confirmed the toilet was unused, adding the loo is "very modern, very good... it can't be kept because it is for royals."

The Thai side covered the construction costs, he added.

Local media reports said the luxury pan was built by the Siam Cement Group, a Thai construction giant partly owned by the Crown Property Bureau, which manages the Thai royal family's assets and investments.

SCG could not be reached for comment.

While the pricey privy has made international headlines it has not received any media attention in Thailand, where a severe lese majeste law punishes any perceived criticism of the royal family with up to 15 years prison.

Tin Luong, the chief of Yeak Lom commune, told AFP he was impressed by the "very beautiful" bathroom.

"Thai engineers have constructed the bathroom," he said confirming all of the materials were brought from Thailand.

"I estimate that it could cost up to $40,000 to build the bathroom. It looks like a house with beautiful decoration," he added.

Figures released last year by UNICEF said 61.5 per cent of Cambodians living in rural areas practice open-defecation -- one of the highest rates in Southeast Asia -- as they have no access to latrines.

Thailand's monarchy is among the world's richest, with its fortune in part built through investments in major local businesses such as SCG and Siam Commercial Bank.

After visiting the lake, the princess opened a new health centre that was donated by the Thai royal family. She also met with Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen during the visit, which ends on Wednesday.

Australia simplifies overseas child adoption

Yahoo – AFP, 25 Jan 2015

Thai surrogate mother Pattaramon Chanbua (L) holds her baby Gammy, born
 with Down Syndrome, at the Samitivej hospital in Chonburi province on
August 4, 2014 (AFP Photo/Nicolas Asfouri)

Australia said on Sunday it was simplifying the process of adopting children from overseas, setting up a single body to manage applications while working on new arrangements with the United States, Poland and Vietnam.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott said a new "one-stop shop" -- the Intercountry Adoption Support Service -- will have staff advocating on behalf of prospective families and dealing with local state authorities and partner countries.

Australia has one of the lowest levels of intercountry adoption in the world, according to a government report last year.

"For too long adoption has been in the too hard basket, for too long it has been too hard to adopt and for too long this has been a policy no-go zone," the Australian leader said in a statement.

"It shouldn't be that way because adoption is all about giving children a better life."

The new service -- which could start as soon as April -- will also seek to reduce the length of time parents have to wait to adopt children, currently an average of five years.

The announcement came just a week after a baby boy at the centre of an international debate about surrogacy was granted Australian citizenship.

Baby Gammy was reportedly abandoned in Thailand by a Perth couple who went home with just his healthy sister.

While commercial surrogacy is illegal in Australia, growing numbers of people are travelling to countries such as India and Thailand to engage women to carry their babies.

Adoption levels have fallen to a record low in Australia, Abbott said, with just 317 domestic and international adoptions finalised between July 1, 2013 and June 30, 2014, nine percent lower than the previous year and 76 percent down from 25 years ago.

Australia has intercountry arrangements with 14 countries, and the government said it was establishing new adoption programmes with the US, Poland and Vietnam, and working on schemes with four other countries.

The four countries were not named by the government, but the Sunday Telegraph said they were Latvia, Kenya, Bulgaria and Cambodia.

Related Article:

Australia gives citizenship to Down Syndrome baby left in Thailand

Explaining Cambodia's 'mystery illness'

BBC News, by Guy De Launey, Phnom Penh, 13 July 2012

Villagers lined up for medical checks outside the Kuntha Bopha children's
hospital in Phnom Penh

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It must be every parent's nightmare - reports of a mystery disease killing dozens of children.

Sixty undiagnosed deaths over a period of three months triggered a report from the Cambodian authorities to the World Health Organisation (WHO). In such cases, there is usually an internal investigation to discover the facts before anything is made public.

This time, however, the report was leaked to a news agency in the Philippines. It soon made international headlines, perhaps understandably, bearing in mind that diseases like SARS and bird flu had first been identified in this region.

But it turned out that the unidentified illness was nothing remotely so serious.

'Needless panic'

Working together with Cambodia's Ministry of Health, the WHO found a virus known as EV71. It was the first time it had been positively identified in Cambodia, but it is common in nearby countries, including Vietnam and China.

It is one of the triggers for hand, foot and mouth disease - a childhood illness that is well-known around the world.

For most children, it causes nothing more than a few days' discomfort. But for those already weakened by malnutrition or diarrhoea, it can become more serious if not properly diagnosed and treated. 

Dr Pochenda Chhorn says poor living
conditions trigger disease

Most health experts in Cambodia were bemused by all the fuss. One told the BBC that treating the illness as a news story would be "like covering an outbreak of chickenpox".

Dr Beat Richner, the Swiss national director of Phnom Penh's Kantha Bopha Children's Hospital, berated the WHO for causing "needless panic" in its handling of the affair.

But officials at the WHO are themselves privately seething that what should have been an internal report ended up going viral, spreading alarm before all the facts were known.

The fuss over the affair will probably die down soon. But some health workers hope that it will at least illuminate the challenges facing Cambodia, especially its young children.

Toilet access

Sixty deaths over three months may seem a lot, until one realises that 50 children under the age of five die in Cambodia every day.

Over a year, that comes to almost 20,000. In all, one in 20 Cambodian children will not live to see their fifth birthdays.

The reasons are tragically simple. Dr Pochenda Chhorn sees them every day at the Cambodian Children's Fund Clinic on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

"They live in very poor conditions. They have low hygiene - this is the biggest cause of disease for them," she said.

It is a staggering statistic, but true nonetheless: Cambodians are more likely to own a mobile phone than have access to a toilet. In rural parts of the country, the vast majority lack sanitation and the consequences are predictable. 

Children in Cambodia are vulnerable to
infections because of poor hygiene

Diarrhoea is one of the main causes of death for the under-fives. Even when it does not kill, it leaves children vulnerable to other infections, including hand, foot and mouth disease.

Simple advice

The WHO's advice for reducing the spread of EV71 and HFMD is simple: wash hands and practise good hygiene. If children develop a fever, treat them with paracetamol.

Despite the recent scare, and the high under-five mortality rate, the WHO is keen to emphasise the progress Cambodia has made. As recently as a decade ago, one in eight children died before they reached five.

Dr Howard Sobel, the WHO Maternal and Child Health Team Leader in Cambodia, says that credit should be given to the government's promotion of breast-feeding.

"These days, three out of four mothers practise exclusive breastfeeding. It used to be one in 10," he says.

Mr Sobel also praises the government's efforts to restrict the advertising of infant formula milk and says the campaign and its results have been remarkable for such a small, developing country.

If that level of commitment could be applied to sanitation and child nutrition, then further success may come. Cambodia's children would then be much less vulnerable to the likes of EV71 and hand, foot and mouth disease.

Officers seize 6 kg of drugs at Soekarno-Hatta

The Jakarta Post, Wed, 09/29/2010 10:36 AM

TANGERANG: Customs and Excise Office seized 3.9 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine worth Rp 5.9 billion (US$659,000) and 2,033 grams of heroin worth Rp 10.1 billion in three foiled smuggling attempts at the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport last weekend.

Officers had arrested two Cambodian women and a Thai girl as suspects in the smuggling attempts, Banten Customs and Excise Office chief Nasar Salim said Tuesday.

“In our continuing investigations, we have also arrested a Nigerian man and an Indonesian woman as the alleged recipients of the drugs in a hotel in Central Jakarta,” he said.

Since January, customs officers have foiled up to 50 drug trafficking attempts through the airport, with a total street value of up to Rp 341 billion, Nasar said. — JP

Drug-resistant TB on the rise in Asia: WHO

Manila (ANTARA News) - World health chiefs stressed on Monday the urgent need for countries to strengthen their health systems to tackle the spread of tuberculosis amid the growing threat of drug-resistant TB.

The World Health Organisation's Dr. Pieter van Maaren told AFP that there were 112,000 new cases of drug-resistant TB in China alone in 2007 and figures for 2008 were likely to be similar.

Van Maaren, WHO's Western Pacific regional adviser for TB, said the Philippines is the second hardest-hit country in the region, with up to 6,000 new cases of resistant TB a year.

Vietnam had an estimated 3,000-4,000 new cases of multi-drug-resistant TB in 2007 while Cambodia had fewer than 1,000 resistant TB cases, he said ahead of World Stop TB Day on Tuesday.

Estimates for 2008 are not yet out but van Maaren told AFP that the rate of new infections will "likely be in the same range" as in 2007.

Exact figures are not available, he said, saying not all of these cases are diagnosed.

Van Maaren, based at the WHO's Western Pacific headquarters in Manila, warned drug-resistant TB was more difficult to diagnose and that drugs to treat it were limited, costly and had more side-effects.

It was "a man-made problem caused by insufficient or inappropriate treatment, a result of patients stopping treatment before they are cured," he said.

This can be seen in the Philippines and partly in China, where many TB patients resorted to "self-medication" without getting the proper medical advice, allowing the TB bacilli to survive, he added.

In contrast, the rates of drug-resistant TB in Vietnam and Cambodia were lower partly because of their good control programmes and also because powerful anti-TB drugs had only been introduced in those countries in the past decade, "so the TB bacilli did not have time to develop resistance."

WHO regional director for the Western Pacific Shin Young-Soo said despite gains using the WHO-recommended TB control strategy, effective TB control had been hampered by weaknesses in health systems such as chronic staff shortages and inadequate resources.

"Our available tools work but they are not enough," said Shin.

Tuberculosis is a contagious lung disease that spreads through the air, including through coughing and sneezing.