By Alex Consiglio
A raging fire tore through a ramshackle riverside community in Phnom Penh, less than 24 hours after a fire the previous evening destroyed a garment factory.
More pics are in the post…
By Alex Consiglio
A fire quickly spread through a garment factory in Phnom Penh, using the piles of clothes as tinder.
More pics in the post…
By Aun Pheap and Alex Consiglio
The Cambodia Daily
SVAY TEAP DISTRICT, Svay Rieng province- Seventeen garment workers and a driver died Tuesday morning when a bus rammed into an overloaded, 15-seat van carrying them and 21 others to work in Bavet City, officials said.
Duch Kahnaroth, a Svay Teap district police officer at the scene of the crash, said the accident occurred at about 7 a.m. and that 14 of the workers died at the crash site on National Road 1. Three more died of their injuries later in the day, while all 21 other passengers were injured.
“The bus was wrong because it tried to overtake a Camry car and hit the van,” Mr. Kahnaroth said. “The bus driver was arrested. He’s now detained at the district police station.”
He was later taken into custody by provincial police, according to Svay Rieng provincial police chief Koeng Khorn.
The driver of the van, who died at the scene of the crash, was transporting his passengers to the Tai Seng Special Economic Zone in Bavet City, where they worked at a number of different garment factories. The bus, which belongs to the 15 SH Transport company, was traveling from Vietnam to Phnom Penh.
By Alex Consiglio and Hay Pisey
The Cambodia Daily
As the number of villagers testing positive for HIV continues to climb in Battambang province’s Roka commune, the Health Ministry is scrambling to rein in the illegal medical practices that may have led to the outbreak and are widespread throughout the country.
Two hundred and twenty-six villagers in Sangke district’s Roka commune have now tested positive for HIV since the commune health center began preliminary tests on December 8, deputy commune chief Soeum Chhom said Sunday.
Yem Chrin, an unlicensed doctor who often made house calls and treated his patients using injections, admitted to police that he reused syringes on multiple occasions, and was jailed on murder charges on December 22.
The cause of the outbreak remains unknown, but a government-led task force, which includes the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, is investigating possible sources of the epidemic and has sent blood samples abroad to determine whether the villagers’ infections share the same viral subtype, which can help narrow down the mode of transmission.
Medical experts say the reuse of syringes is unlikely to be the sole cause of the HIV outbreak, but that it is plausible a lone medical practitioner single-handedly spread the virus to hundreds of people if infection prevention protocols were not followed.
“This can happen anywhere,” said Ung Prahors, acting director of the Cambodian Health Committee, an NGO that provides assistance to villagers in poor communes suffering from AIDS and tuberculosis.
By Alex Consiglio and Khy Sovuthy
The Cambodia Daily
ROKA COMMUNE, Battambang province – While police on Thursday searched the home of the unlicensed doctor suspected of spreading HIV to more than 100 people here, Prime Minister Hun Sen, speaking in Phnom Penh, said he had serious doubts about the accuracy of the equipment used in multiple rounds of testing.
Since the Roka commune health center in Sangke district began preliminary testing for the virus on December 8, about 110 people have been found to be infected with HIV, including 19 children. Five more were found to be carrying the virus Thursday morning, according to the center’s director.
But speaking to some 1,000 students and government officials at a graduation ceremony at the National Institute of Education, Mr. Hun Sen said he was all but certain that the spate of positive HIV results was due to faulty testing equipment, rather than an actual outbreak of the virus.
“So far, I 99 percent do not believe that it’s AIDS,” Mr. Hun Sen said. “If out of 800 people, 106 are infected, that’s the end of us.”
“Probably, if we were tested using those machines, half of us would be infected by AIDS. I still don’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”
Mr. Hun Sen said all available “technological resources” must be exhausted before coming to any conclusions.
“Is an 80-year-old person infected with AIDS? And are young children infected with AIDS too? So, we don’t need to make a quick conclusion. We must use all available technological resources,” he said.
“We don’t mean that we look down on our doctors and equipment, but it’s extremely hard to believe.”
Of the 90 villagers who had tested positive at the commune center as of Tuesday, 89 again came up positive when tested a second time at the provincial referral hospital on Wednesday, according to Mean Chhi Vun, director of the Health Ministry’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology and STD (NCHADS).