Medical blog » Asian

Asian Health Officials Warn That Without Intervention, HIV Cases …

admin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:58:59 +0000

conference in Hong Kong said that the region is facing a resurgence of HIV cases among men who have sex with men that will not subside without increased government efforts, the
reports (Freeda,
, 2/19). The conference was organized in partnership with Hong Kong’s
, the
and included about 50 government officials responsible for HIV/AIDS and MSM programs, as well as other experts.
According to officials at the conference, discriminatory laws, stigma, low condom use, multiple sex partners and limited health care access are contributing to the spread of HIV among MSM in the region (Chui,
, 2/19). WHO regional adviser Massimo Ghidinelli said, “Studies show that at present, the proportion of HIV infections being transmitted among men who have sex with men is larger and more significant than we had originally believed” (
, 2/19). Shivananda Khan, a representative with the
, said, “We are facing an emerging catastrophe. Unless we intervene now, the level of infection over the next 20 years will double every year and the number of the (affected) MSM and transgender people will be more than any other population in this region.” York Chow Yat-ngok, Hong Kong’s secretary for food and health, said that there has been a “rapid rise” of HIV cases among MSM and that HIV prevalence among this population is 10 times that of other high-risk groups, including sex workers and injection drug users. He added that a lack of knowledge and limited access to treatment also increases the risk of HIV among MSM. Director of Health Lam Ping Yan attributed the rise in HIV cases among MSM in part to the increased use of online dating services and psychotropic substances.
Edmund Settle, an HIV/AIDS policy specialist, said “Discriminatory laws, attitude and behavior are undermining effective programming and limiting access to health services,” adding that they must be “challenged and revised” at the earliest opportunity (
, 2/19). Ghidinelli said that improving surveillance and providing HIV prevention and care to MSM should be prioritized to help curb the spread of HIV/AIDS (
, 2/19).”>
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It's a boy! Asian immigrants use medical technology to satisfy age …

admin — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 10:09:43 +0000

Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.
The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son.
With birth records in Santa Clara County showing that Asian mothers are more likely to give birth to sons than white or Latino mothers are, the new data could reawaken a local controversy. Some local South Asian women have pressured local Indo-American newspapers and magazines in recent years to stop running ads for medical procedures that offer prospective parents the promise of a son.
For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child.”
Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure their
later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead.
“We didn’t expect to see a male bias. And for the first child, we didn’t find one. It seems to appear after a first daughter, and more strongly after a second daughter,” said Douglas Almond, co-author of the Columbia study.
Among Indian families in Santa Clara County in the 1990s, Texas economist Jason Abrevaya found a 58 percent chance of having a son among families that first had two girls — significantly higher than the natural 51 percent chance of having a boy.
The teams found no comparable bias toward boys among white, African-American and Japanese-American families that first had girls.
Abrevaya found evidence that female infanticide, a practice documented in India and China, is not happening in the U.S. The economists’ data indicates only that some couples have manipulated the natural odds of having a son or daughter; it does not identify the means they used to do it.
“If gender-selective abortion is the cause for the unusual Asian Indian boy birth ratios, then the abortion rate would be 20 to 25 percent of female fetuses who otherwise would have been the family’s third or fourth child,” Abrevaya said.
For Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, the demand for a son is a business opportunity.
While abortion might have been the common medical procedure available for sex selection in the early 1990s, one of the methods advertised among ethnic communities today is PGD — preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
Steinberg, the medical director of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, uses PGD to harvest fertilized embryos, identify their sex after a few cellular divisions, and implant the chosen gender. Chinese and Indian couples from the Bay Area, who pay up to $18,000 per attempt to have a boy, are a major source of his clients, Steinberg said.
“Clearly among the Chinese population, there’s heavy interest in male children. The Indian population also has a heavy interest in boys,” he said. The U.S. is one of a very few countries that does not ban using techniques like PGD for gender selection. (PGD was developed to screen for hereditary diseases like cystic fibrosis). Among Steinberg’s Chinese clients who use PGD to assure a son, 40 percent come from the Bay Area, 40 percent travel from China, and 20 percent come from Southern California and the rest of the world. He also sees large numbers of Indian parents from the Bay Area.
“It’s emotional for them, and it’s emotional for us,” Steinberg said. “They come in feeling that they owe me an excuse for wanting to be there.”
Not all his clients are interested only in boys. Canadians, for instance, tend to prefer girls. “That keeps us very comfortable with what we’re doing ethically,” he said.
The normal ratio of boys to girls at birth is about 105 boys per 100 girls. But in parts of India and China, as ultrasound and other medical technology became available to reveal the sex of unborn children, the ratio of boys to girls age 4 or younger jumped from 104 boys per 100 girls in 1981 to about 108 boys in 2001, according to a recent United Nations Population Fund report.
The preference for sons goes back 2,500 years in some parts of China, with economic and social roots through marriage dowries and other traditions. In India, some Hindus believe only a son can perform certain funeral rites for a father. And sons are expected to financially care for their parents in their old age.
Some who study the Indian Diaspora say son-selection may not die out, even in the U.S. Abrevaya, who found much stronger evidence for son selection among Indians than among Chinese living in the U.S., worries that as PGD becomes less expensive, more people will use it.
Preeti Shekar, a Berkeley-based journalist and activist who believes there are “sexist and racist consequences” to medical technologies like PGD, has urged a petition campaign to stop the ethnic media from running ads for Steinberg’s clinic.
“There needs to be a lot of consciousness-raising,” she said. “We do need to do things with the South Asian community, because especially in Silicon Valley, they are pretty conservative.”
One San Jose doctor received angry letters after he ran ads in India Currents magazine promoting “sex preselection” services.
Dr. Suresh Nayak uses a technique that selects sperm before conception to greatly increase the odds of having a child of the chosen gender. Nayak did not respond to telephone calls from the Mercury News, but highlights those services on his Web site.
In India Currents, Nayak defended his services as preferable to abortion.
“Being in the obstetrics-gynecology field, I see a fair number of couples terminating pregnancies of the ‘undesired sex’ after doing ultrasounds and amniocentesis,” Nayak wrote.
“It is sad that the Indian culture that we love and are so proud of also has men believing that if they don’t have a son to perform their last rites, their soul will never rest in peace. Whose fault is it for making them believe that?”
.

Group Sex, Low Condom Use Spur Spread of HIV in Asian Gay Men

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:13:18 +0000

Group Sex, Low Condom Use Spur Spread of HIV in Asian Gay Men
Feb. 18 (Bloomberg) — HIV is spreading rapidly among gay
and bisexual men in Asia, as group sex and low condom use make
male-to-male intimacies the region’s fastest-growing means of
transmitting the deadly human immunodeficiency virus, health
officials said.
New cases of HIV have surged in Asian cities such as
Bangkok, where more than 30 percent of gay and bisexual men now
have the AIDS-causing infection, said
, who’s
tracking the epidemic with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention’s Southeast Asia regional office.
“We’re really in for big trouble,” Griensven said at a
meeting of health officials in Hong Kong today. “There’s still
time to do something, but we need to act rapidly.”
HIV transmission patterns among gay and bisexual men in
Asian cities are starting to mirror those in the West as young
men engage in more unprotected sex with several partners each
month, said
, a Manila-based HIV-AIDS policy
specialist with the United Nations Development Program.
Men who have sex with men may account for as much as half
of all new infections in the region by 2020, compared with about
15 percent last year, according to estimates last year in a
on the epidemic commissioned by the United Nations.
In China, about 5 percent of men who have sex with men have
HIV, compared with 0.1 percent of all adults aged 15 to 49, said
, director of the nation’s national center for AIDS
control and prevention, in a presentation yesterday.
A survey of 18,000 gay and bisexual men in 61 Chinese
cities showed HIV prevalence as high as 18 percent, Wu said.
Infections are rising as more young men engage in group sex,
sometimes while taking amphetamines, and increasingly use the
Internet to find sexual partners, he said.
“They’re not afraid” of contracting HIV, Wu said. “They
perceive personal relationships as more important than any health
issue.”
A total of 6,897 people died of AIDS in China in the first
nine months of last year, making it the nation’s deadliest
infectious disease, China’s Ministry of Health said in a report
posted on the government’s Web site Feb. 17.
There may be about 10 million gay and bisexual men in Asia,
said
, adviser on HIV and AIDS in the World
Health Organization’s Western Pacific region. Wu said he had “no
idea” how many such men are in China, adding the number could be
anywhere between 1 million and 30 million. That makes reaching
them with measures to prevent infections difficult, he said.
About 5 million people in Asia had HIV in 2007, according
to World Health Organization and UNAIDS data. That number may
double by 2020, and 6 million households may be pushed into
poverty by 2015 unless efforts to prevent new infections are
expanded, the UN report said.
.
Last Updated: February 18, 2009 13:19 EST

Asian immigrants use medical technology to satisfy age-old desire …

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 21:59:46 +0000

Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.
The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son.
With birth records in Santa Clara County showing that Asian mothers are more likely to give birth to sons than white or Hispanic mothers are, the new data could reawaken a local controversy. Some local South Asian women have pressured local Indo-American newspapers and magazines in recent years to stop running ads for medical procedures that offer prospective parents the promise of a son.
For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child.”
Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure
their later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead.
“We didn’t expect to see a male bias. And for the first child, we didn’t find one. It seems to appear after a first daughter, and more strongly after a second daughter,” said Douglas Almond, co-author of the Columbia study.
Among Indian families in Santa Clara County in the 1990s, Texas economist Jason Abrevaya found a 58 percent chance of having a son among families that first had two girls — significantly higher than the natural 51 percent chance of having a boy.
The teams found no comparable bias toward boys among white, black and Japanese-American families that first had girls.
Abrevaya found evidence that female infanticide, a practice documented in India and China, is not happening in the U.S. The economists’ data indicates only that some couples have manipulated the natural odds of having a son or daughter; it does not identify the means they used to do it.
“If gender-selective abortion is the cause for the unusual Asian Indian boy birth ratios, then the abortion rate would be 20 to 25 percent of female fetuses who otherwise would have been the family’s third or fourth child,” Abrevaya said.
For Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, the demand for a son is a business opportunity.
While abortion might have been the common medical procedure available for sex selection in the early 1990s, one of the methods advertised among ethnic communities today is PGD — preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
Steinberg, the medical director of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, uses PGD to harvest fertilized embryos, identify their sex after a few cellular divisions, and implant the chosen gender. Chinese and Indian couples from the Bay Area, who pay up to $18,000 per attempt to have a boy, are a major source of his clients, Steinberg said.
“Clearly among the Chinese population, there’s heavy interest in male children. The Indian population also has a heavy interest in boys,” he said. The U.S. is one of a very few countries that does not ban using techniques like PGD for gender selection. (PGD was developed to screen for hereditary diseases like Cystic Fibrosis). Among Steinberg’s Chinese clients who use PGD to assure a son, 40 percent come from the Bay Area, 40 percent travel from China, and 20 percent come from Southern California and the rest of the world. He also sees large numbers of Indian parents from the Bay Area.
“It’s emotional for them, and it’s emotional for us,” Steinberg said. “They come in feeling that they owe me an excuse for wanting to be there.”
Not all his clients are only interested in boys. Canadians, for instance, tend to prefer girls. “That keeps us very comfortable with what we’re doing ethically,” he said.
The normal ratio of boys to girls at birth is about 105 boys per 100 girls. But in parts of India and China, as ultrasound and other medical technology became available to reveal the sex of unborn children, the ratio of boys to girls aged 4 or younger jumped from 104 boys per 100 girls in 1981 to about 108 boys in 2001, according to a recent United Nations Population Fund report.
The preference for sons goes back 2,500 years in some parts of China, with economic and social roots through marriage dowries and other traditions. In India, some Hindus believe only a son can perform certain funeral rites for a father. And sons are expected to financially care for their parents in their old age.
Some who study the Indian diaspora say son-selection may not die out, even in the U.S. Abrevaya, who found much stronger evidence for son-selection among Indians than among Chinese living in the U.S., worries that as PGD becomes less expensive, more people will use it.
Preeti Shekar, a Berkeley-based journalist and activist who believes there are “sexist and racist consequences” to medical technologies like PGD, has urged a petition campaign to stop the ethnic media from running ads for Steinberg’s clinic.
“There needs to be a lot of consciousness-raising,” she said. “We do need to do things with the South Asian community, because especially in Silicon Valley, they are pretty conservative.”
One San Jose doctor received angry letters after he ran ads in India Currents magazine promoting “sex preselection” services.
Dr. Suresh Nayak uses a technique that selects sperm before conception to greatly increase the odds of having a child of the chosen gender. Nayak did not respond to telephone calls from the San Jose Mercury News, but highlights those services on his Web site.
In India Currents, Nayak defended his services as preferable to abortion.
“Being in the obstetrics-gynecology field, I see a fair number of couples terminating pregnancies of the ‘undesired sex’ after doing ultrasounds and amniocentesis,” Nayak wrote.
“It is sad that the Indian culture that we love and are so proud of also has men believing that if they don’t have a son to perform their last rites, their soul will never rest in peace. Whose fault is it for making them believe that?”
Choosing Sons?
Over the past five years, Asian mothers in Santa Clara County were slightly more likely to have sons than other ethnic groups. The normal ratio is 105 boys born for every 100 girls.
134,513
105.2
43,048
107.2
48,447
103.5
37,694
105.6
Data is for the years 2003 through 2007 for the three largest ethnic groups in Santa Clara County, comprising 97 percent of births to county residents.

FDA crackdown dramatically cuts availability of Asian food …

admin — Sat, 31 May 2008 10:08:52 +0000

Last year’s death of six Chinese infants and sickening of 300,000 others from tainted baby formula has created a nightmare for Bay Area food importers, who say they won’t be able to get many of their products on local shelves in time for the lunar new year.
“Consumers are going to have less than half the usual choice this new year,” which begins Monday, said Taylor Chow of the Burlingame-based Oriental Food Association, which represents Northern California’s major Asian food importers.
A crackdown by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on food imported from China that contains milk products has created a huge backlog of products in Bay Area warehouses. Importers say a new FDA-imposed testing process takes
so long that much of the food won’t get to market for the start of the Year of the Ox.
Before the new testing program, random FDA tests would take about a week. Now cases of food can be stuck in warehouses for up to three months, Chow said.
Products that won’t be available include a range of specialty candies and baked goods, sugarcoated melon, lotus seed and water chestnuts — all popular lunar new year items.
Chow, manager of the Oakland-based trading company American Tai Wah, says importers are avoiding hundreds of Chinese products because they don’t want the burden of proving that they don’t contain milk. “They’re so scared of the FDA that they’re not importing anything,” Chow said.
times,” said Jason Lam, sales and marketing manager at New Horizon Enterprises in Hayward. “The economy is already tough enough.”
Lam said New Horizon, which imports food products largely from mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, has recently seen its business plunge up to 30 percent.
In early September the Chinese government announced that the country’s biggest milk producer had recalled 700 tons of baby formula found to be tainted with melamine, a toxic chemical commonly used in plastic production. In 2007, Chinese pet food was found to be contaminated with the chemical, which can cause cancer, reproductive damage, renal failure and kidney stones.
Investigators suspect that melamine was used by about two dozen Chinese milk producers to cover up the watering-down of baby formula.
In November, the FDA ordered tests for melamine of all products containing milk products from China. The order jolted many of the 100 or so Bay Area importers that sell a wide variety of Asian cookies, biscuits, crackers, pastries and candy containing milk powder — much of it imported from China. Importers say those products routinely take a month or two to get the FDA’s clearance after they arrive at the Port of Oakland.
Albert Lin, managing director of Union City-based Khong Guan Corp., said importers have the option of letting the FDA do the testing for free or paying $1,000 per product to have it tested at a private lab.
Because a shipping container can contain 15 to 20 different kinds of food products, the cost of private testing can be exorbitant. But if companies wait for FDA inspectors to test the items, it can take several weeks before they even show up, Lin said.
Michael Herndon, an FDA spokesman, said the “import alert” issued in November applies only to “foods from China that contain milk or ingredients made from milk.” But he said the “burden is on the importer to show the product does not contain milk or milk-derived ingredients, or does not contain” prohibited levels of melamine.
Herndon said some foods in the U.S. and other countries have been found to contain melamine — most of them “the kinds typically found in Asian markets.” Recalled foods are listed on the FDA’s Web site,
.
Lin said “food importers totally support” the FDA’s mission to protect public safety. But, he said, they deserve assurances that the tests “will be carried out in a timely matter.”
Several customers interviewed in local Asian supermarkets seemed less concerned about the lack of variety of foods than the possibility that some of it may contain melamine.
“I’m really scared about that,” said Ann Nguyen, a mother of four who was shopping this week at the Ocean Supermarket in Milpitas.
Nguyen said she now avoids all products from China as well as her native Vietnam, from which she escaped by boat in 1979. And, she said, she always gets one of her four boys, ages 17 to 26, to carefully read the ingredients because she doesn’t trust her imperfect English.
But other shoppers seemed less concerned that they would be poisoned by melamine. Among them was Zin Nwe, an ethnic Chinese who recently graduated from medical school in her native Burma, also known as Myanmar. She was also shopping at Ocean Supermarket.
“This is a Chinese supermarket,” she said, adding with a laugh: “Everything is from China.”
She said she was more worried about the latest food scare: salmonella-contaminated peanut butter.
or (408) 920-5552.

State-of-the-art Asian Human Services' family health center

admin — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 05:22:42 +0000

CHICAGO: One of the biggest concerns facing immigrant community and the under-privileged in the society in general is affordable health care. It is a gigantic task that defiles easy solution at national and local level.Asian Human Services (AHS) that has at its helm an India born woman community activist, Abha Pandya, took a small but a very admirable step five years ago in seeking to provide medical help to the needy and has expanded to a veritable haven for uninsured and under insured members of society who otherwise would go without medical care.
AHS set up in 1978 has grown with its expanding client population to become a comprehensive social service agency providing primary healthcare, mental health, employment, community health, and adult literacy programs to thousands of underserved minorities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area.Its Family Health Center’s full-time professional medical staff includes three family physicians, a pediatrician and an Ob/Gyn. The Center also has a psychiatrist on staff.
The bilingual staff speaks more than 10 languages and can draw upon the extensive AHS network to provide translations in over 25 languages. This assures that a full range of patients can communicate their concerns comfortably, according to Muhammad Paracha, Clinic Director. “We accept all forms of insurance, including Medicaid, Medicare, All Kids, Family Care and private insurance. And we offer discounted fees for the uninsured, so our comprehensive family health services are widely available,” he said.Abha Pandya, CEO of AHS added that the Family Health Center’s focus is family-orientated and fully inclusive.
“Our programming and services include family practice, pediatrics, well child care and school physicals, OB-Gyn and prenatal care, mental health services, adult medicine, women’s health, All Kids/Family Care enrollments, health screenings and tests, discounted lab services, in house WIC services and outreach and prevention,” she said.
“We have also been designated by the state as a Lead Agency for the Illinois Breast and Cervical Cancer Program (IBCCP),” she added. “We accept all forms of insurance, including Medicaid, Medicare, All Kids, Family Care and private insurance. And we offer discounted fees for the uninsured, so our comprehensive family health services are widely available.”Falguni Amin is yet another dedicated worker at AHS and has been acting as coordinator for its mental health program since 2002. She is serving adults and families at AHS family health center.
She said that the organization offers a variety of service, including primary care, pediatrics, ob/gyn, mental health services, All Kids enrolment and a WIC program for mothers and infants. “In 2007, the clinic had 8500 medical visits and it would be substantially more this year,” she said with humility.AHS is also one of the sponsoring partners of Asian American Legal Services Clinic which is a pro bono legal clinic providing free legal services to low-income and underserved residents of the Uptown community.
The Legal Services are offered in Uptown every 1st Wednesday of the month starting at 6:30 pm at the office of Asian Human Services (AHS), located 4753 North Broadway, Suite 700, Chicago. The agency provides Chicago’s pan Asian and other immigrant and refugee communities with quality employment, community health, Passages Charter School, ESL and Computer classes and mental health services.
They accept a wide variety of cases, including immigration-related matters, divorces, landlord-tenant disputes, consumer fraud and social security-related issues. It offers top quality representation by attorneys and law students who volunteer through DLA Piper US LLP (DLA Piper)–a leading Chicago-based international law firm–and through Chicago Volunteer Legal Services Foundation (CVLS), which arranges quality pro bono legal services for the working poor.

Survey shows four in five Asian migrants unhappy with medical care

admin — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:46:29 +0000

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 7:40p.m.
A survey of Asian migrants in Christchurch has found that less than one in five is happy with the care they receive from their GPs.
For Asians migrants, being told by a doctor to take a paracetamol and wait and see, does not quite cut it. In Asia, a patient can expect – and get – a quick remedy.
“You don’t have to book, you wait your turn and when you see the doctor, the doctor will give you injection,” Simon Tam says.
Researchers have found that health problems tend to creep up on migrant families.
“For the first ten years, migrants do fantastically well when they migrate,” Ruth de Souza from the Centre for Asian Health Research and Evaluation says. “Because the selection bias is that we pick the healthiest fittest people.”
But eventually, disease catches up with them and they have no choice but to re-enter the health system. However, it is their children who suffer the most. They are more likely to develop diabetes, heart disease and mental illness.
“In Christchurch, we’re sitting on a time bomb,” ethnic liaison officer Wayne Reid warns.” If we don’t do something about it, we’re going to have a real problem in five to ten years time.”
However, it is not just a problem in Christchurch. Migrants face difficulties getting to grips with the medical system. One Auckland survey reports that just 45 percent of Asian women have cervical smears – the lowest uptake amongst all ethnic groups.
The main problem for many migrants is understanding what the doctor is trying to explain to them.
Researchers will discuss the treatment of Asian people at a conference in Auckland tomorrow. Their message to migrants is that they should not just see the doctor when they are sick, but also to prevent illness in the first place.

‘How Asian countries flood Nigeria with fake drugs’

admin — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 13:24:25 +0000

The Director-General of National Agency for Food, Drugs and Administration and Control, Prof. Dora Akunyili, on Thursday said some foreign countries, especially Asians, operated discriminatory drug and food policies to the detriment of other countries, such as Nigeria.
She said while the drug and food industry in Nigeria was over-regulated, other countries only concentrated on regulating internally consumed drugs and foods, without bothering about what was being exported.
Akunyili stated these while receiving the Nigeria Arise Award of Excellence from the founder of Ben TV, London and the Nigeria Arise Project, Mr. Alistair Soyode, in Abuja.
She said it was because of these practices by some foreign countries that had made the country a dumping ground for different drugs and food products by fraudulent drug importers and exporters from such countries.
The NAFDAC boss said, вЂњThere is a terrible and discriminatory drug regulatory policy by some foreign countries. This has led to severe problems for countries such as Nigeria.
вЂњSome countries, especially the Asian countries, regulate drugs and food products meant for their internal consumption, but do very little or no regulation for drugs, food products, and cosmetics meant for outside consumption.вЂќ
She said, вЂњThe foreigners who sell all the substandard drugs for us are not interested in what happens to our people. So, we always tell our people who go to import substandard drugs that you are killing your people.
вЂњI dare to say that the Nigerian drugs and pharmaceutical industry is over-regulated. I now tell them to go out and market their products outside the shores of Nigeria since our drugs are now the toast of the international community.вЂќ
The Ben TV founder advised Nigerians to adopt a concept of service and re-orientation both at home and abroad so that their worth would be recognised like AkunyiliвЂ™s.

It's a boy! Asian immigrants use medical technology to satisfy…

admin — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:20:37 +0000

Researchers are finding the first evidence that some Asian immigrant families are using U.S. medical technology to have sons instead of daughters, apparently acting on an age-old cultural prejudice that has led to high ratios of boys to girls in parts of China and India.
The new research, produced by independent teams of economists who arrived at similar conclusions, focused on Indian, Chinese and Korean families who first had girls and then used modern technology to have a son.
With birth records in Santa Clara County showing that Asian mothers are more likely to give birth to sons than white or Latino mothers are, the new data could reawaken a local controversy. Some local South Asian women have pressured local Indo-American newspapers and magazines in recent years to stop running ads for medical procedures that offer prospective parents the promise of a son.
For some South Asian couples, having a boy is a “status symbol,” said Deepka Lalwani of Milpitas, the founder and president of Indian Business & Professional Women, a nonprofit business support network. “If a woman has male children, she feels in her family, certainly with her in-laws, that her status will go up because now she is the mother of a male child.”
Such cultural pressures may explain the recent findings. A Columbia University study suggests that Chinese, Indian and Korean immigrants have been using medical technology, most likely including abortion, to assure their
later children were boys. And a soon-to-be published analysis of birth records by a University of Texas economist estimates there were 2,000 “missing girls” between 1991 and 2004 among immigrant families from China and India living in the U.S. — children never born because their parents chose to have sons instead.
“We didn’t expect to see a male bias. And for the first child, we didn’t find one. It seems to appear after a first daughter, and more strongly after a second daughter,” said Douglas Almond, co-author of the Columbia study.
Among Indian families in Santa Clara County in the 1990s, Texas economist Jason Abrevaya found a 58 percent chance of having a son among families that first had two girls — significantly higher than the natural 51 percent chance of having a boy.
The teams found no comparable bias toward boys among white, African-American and Japanese-American families that first had girls.
Abrevaya found evidence that female infanticide, a practice documented in India and China, is not happening in the U.S. The economists’ data indicates only that some couples have manipulated the natural odds of having a son or daughter; it does not identify the means they used to do it.
“If gender-selective abortion is the cause for the unusual Asian Indian boy birth ratios, then the abortion rate would be 20 to 25 percent of female fetuses who otherwise would have been the family’s third or fourth child,” Abrevaya said.
For Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, the demand for a son is a business opportunity.
While abortion might have been the common medical procedure available for sex selection in the early 1990s, one of the methods advertised among ethnic communities today is PGD — preimplantation genetic diagnosis.
Steinberg, the medical director of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, uses PGD to harvest fertilized embryos, identify their sex after a few
cellular divisions, and implant the chosen gender. Chinese and Indian couples from the Bay Area, who pay up to $18,000 per attempt to have a boy, are a major source of his clients, Steinberg said.
“Clearly among the Chinese population, there’s heavy interest in male children. The Indian population also has a heavy interest in boys,” he said. The U.S. is one of a very few countries that does not ban using techniques like PGD for gender selection. (PGD was developed to screen for hereditary diseases like cystic fibrosis). Among Steinberg’s Chinese clients who use PGD to assure a son, 40 percent come from the Bay Area, 40 percent travel from China, and 20 percent come from Southern California and the rest of the world. He also sees large
numbers of Indian parents from the Bay Area.
“It’s emotional for them, and it’s emotional for us,” Steinberg said. “They come in feeling that they owe me an excuse for wanting to be there.”
Not all his clients are interested only in boys. Canadians, for instance, tend to prefer girls. “That keeps us very comfortable with what we’re doing ethically,” he said.
The normal ratio of boys to girls at birth is about 105 boys per 100 girls. But in parts of India and China, as ultrasound and other medical technology became available to reveal the sex of unborn children, the ratio of boys to girls age 4 or younger jumped from 104 boys per 100 girls in 1981 to about 108 boys in 2001, according to a recent United Nations Population Fund report.
The preference for sons goes back 2,500 years in some parts of China, with economic and social roots through marriage dowries and other traditions. In India, some Hindus believe only a son can perform certain funeral rites for a father. And sons are expected to financially care for their parents in their old age.
Some who study the Indian Diaspora say son-selection may not die out, even in the U.S. Abrevaya, who found much stronger evidence for son selection among Indians than among Chinese living in the U.S., worries that as PGD becomes less expensive, more people will use it.
Preeti Shekar, a Berkeley-based journalist and activist who believes there are “sexist and racist consequences” to medical technologies like PGD, has urged a petition campaign to stop the ethnic media from running ads for Steinberg’s clinic.
“There needs to be a lot of consciousness-raising,” she said. “We do need to do things with the South Asian community, because especially in Silicon Valley, they are pretty conservative.”
One San Jose doctor received angry letters after he ran ads in India Currents magazine promoting “sex preselection” services.
Dr. Suresh Nayak uses a technique that selects sperm before conception to greatly increase the odds of having a child of the chosen gender. Nayak did not respond to telephone calls from the Mercury News, but highlights those services on his Web site.
In India Currents, Nayak defended his services as preferable to abortion.
“Being in the obstetrics-gynecology field, I see a fair number of couples terminating pregnancies of the ‘undesired sex’ after doing ultrasounds and amniocentesis,” Nayak wrote.
“It is sad that the Indian culture that we love and are so proud of also has men believing that if they don’t have a son to perform their last rites, their soul will never rest in peace. Whose fault is it for making them believe that?”
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FDA Finds Melamine in Asian Milk Drinks

admin — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:58:58 +0000

ROCKVILLE, Md., Oct. 14 — FDA testing found melamine in two milk products sold in Asian grocery stores in New York, the agency said.
The products, YILI Brand Sour Milk Drink and YILI Brand Pure Milk Drink have been recalled by distributor HUA XIA Food Trade USA of Flushing, N.Y.
The drinks are packaged in 250-ml flexible paperboard boxes.
The Sour Milk Drink container has blue, red, and green Chinese writing and a picture of an Asian man in a green shirt and white tie clapping his hands.
The Pure Milk Drink has black, red, and white English and Chinese writing, with a picture of two cows playing basketball.
No illnesses have been reported because of the drinks.
An FDA spokesperson said the agency has increased inspections and product testing of milk-derived ingredients and finished food products containing milk manufactured in China after thousands of Chinese infants became sick from melamine-contaminated formula.
Since mid-September, the FDA has recalled instant coffee and tea products imported from China and a fruit-flavored drink called Blue Cat, because of possible melamine contamination.
And two weeks ago, the agency concluded that any amount of melamine in baby formula was a safety concern.