Health | WPN World People News

Southeast Asia's proximity to China and dependence on that nation for a major share of its economy is raising concerns that the coronavirus outbreak that started there will not only have health impacts but harm the region's economies.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is working with officials in Thailand and China following reports of confirmation of the novel coronavirus in a person in Thailand.

A series of earthquakes and aftershocks in Puerto Rico this week prompted Health and Human Services Secretary Alex. M. Azar II to declare a public health emergency for the U.S. territory.

Dietary supplements containing zinc and folic acid — marketed as a treatment for male infertility — do not appear to improve pregnancy rates, sperm counts or sperm function, according to a study conducted by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), part of the National Institutes of Health. The study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

An analysis of U.S. death certificate data by researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes of Health, found that nearly 1 million people died from alcohol-related causes between 1999 and 2017. The number of death certificates mentioning alcohol more than doubled from 35,914 in 1999 to 72,558 in 2017, the year in which alcohol played a role in 2.6% of all deaths in the United States. The increase in alcohol-related deaths is consistent with reports of increases in alcohol consumption and alcohol-involved emergency department visits and hospitalizations during the same period. The new findings are reported online in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

Amid the epidemic levels of youth use of e-cigarettes and the popularity of certain products among children, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on January 2,2020 issued a policy prioritizing enforcement against certain unauthorized flavored e-cigarette products that appeal to kids, including fruit and mint flavors. Under this policy, companies that do not cease manufacture, distribution and sale of unauthorized flavored cartridge-based e-cigarettes (other than tobacco or menthol) within 30 days risk FDA enforcement actions.

On December 27,2019, CMS is extending the comment period for the previously released Transparency in Coverage Proposed Rule published on November 27, 2019 by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, and the Department of the Treasury. This proposed rule delivers on President Trump’s Executive Order on Improving Price and Quality Transparency.

A man cries with laughter as he holds his newborn baby, born a few moments before at Lerdsin Hospital, Bangkok, Thailand.