Health and medicine in the People's Republic of China

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Women Suicides Reflect Drudgery of Rural Life
By Antoaneta Bezlova, IPS, 21 September 1998. The suicide rate in China is up to three times that of many western industrialised countries. Suicides in China have shattered some social theories applicable to Western countries. Female rural conditions rather than male urban alienation. Women in the countryside bear the brunt of the economic liberalization. Traditional rural culture and income disparity.
Smoking ‘May Kill a Third of Chinese Men’—Studies
IPS, 19 November 1998. The largest ever investigation on the hazards of tobacco, involving 1.25 million people. 12 percent of all adult male deaths and three percent of all adult female deaths in China are now caused by smoking. Smoking in China is on the increase and there has been a sharp rise in cigarette sales in the last 30 years. The number of Chinese women who smoke is fairly small and is falling. Tobacco kills half of all smokers.
Health System Ill Due to Market Reforms
By Antoaneta Bezlova, IPS, 18 August 2000. Public concern about a deepening crisis in China's health system and the increasingly frequent occurrence of such deplorable incidents as rejection of patients by hospitals. As China dismantles its socialist welfare system and makes people pay for everything, the least successful and most criticised of market reforms launched in the 1980s have been those of its health system.
Miners trapped in China blast
BBC News Online, 6 November 2000. Most mines have poor communication and safety equipment. Some reports say an average of 10,000 miners are killed in accidents every year. Thousands more are maimed or die from lung cancer.
Diabetes Likely Double as More People Become Overweight
China News Digest, 3 June 2001. A study about disease risk linked to fatness among Chinese people suggests China faces an emerging epidemic of obesity. Five per cent of Chinese people are overweight while it is 10 to 20 per cent in Europe and 30 per cent in the United States. However, in some parts of the country, the figure is up to 30 per cent.
China Reports New HIV/AIDS Statistics
Xinhua, 23 August 2001. Accumulated number of confirmed HIV/AIDS cases is 26,058. Statistics indicated that intravenous drug use is the leading cause of HIV/ AIDS, followed by sexual contact and the mother-infant transmission.
Chinese Farmers Not Well-Informed about Genetic Probe
Alliance for Human Research Protection, 18 February 2002. A January 2002 report in China Daily raises troubling ethical concerns about U.S. government sponsored genetic research in rural China. The research involved thousands of peasants in one of China's poorest rural provinces. It was sponsored jointly by the National Institutes of Health and Harvard University. Nine genetic screening projects sought genetic links to diseases.