Regional lung health conference kicks off

April 12, 2013 3:31 PM GMT+7

VGP - The 4th Union Asia Pacific Region Conference on Lung Health (APRC 2013) and the 5th National Scientific Conference on Lung Diseases are taking place in Ha Noi with more than 1,000 domestic and international delegates participating.

Chèn chú thích ảnh vào đây

The 4^th APRC 2013, from April 10-13, with the theme "Optimizing the access to better apply new technologies in lung health", listens to 250 scientific reports presented by leading scientists in Viet Nam and Asia – Pacific.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), tuberculosis is the second deadly disease after HIV/AIDS. Advances in the treatment of drug-resistant TB strains are slow while multi-drug resistant strains of TB have increased, reaching 60,000 cases worldwide in 2011.

Epidemiologically, the number of TB cases is highest in Asia and Africa and India and China both account for 40% of TB cases in the world.

Tuberculosis has become complicated and highly resistant to medicines. The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development has called the drug-resistant TB strains as one of the threats of global health.

Viet Nam ranks 12th out of 22 countries in the world with the highest burden of TB.

Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Thi Xuyen said that the country has detected yearly around 5,000 cases of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, a dangerous development of the disease as it is resistant to most of treatment drugs. Meanwhile, human resources for the prevention and control of tuberculosis are inefficient at all levels, especially at the district level.

The 5^th National Scientific Conference on Lung Diseases sees scientific reports focus on tuberculosis, lung cancer, COPD, asthma, pneumonia, tobacco and tobacco smoking cessation, which are presented by leading regional and international speakers.

By Ngoc Van