分类： health

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – In a public announcement made Friday, 72-year-old Cambodian King Norodom Sihamoni confirmed that he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer during a recent medical visit and will receive all required treatment for the condition in China, where the diagnosis was first confirmed.

The monarch’s statement, published to his official Facebook page and distributed nationwide by Cambodia’s state-run news agency AKP, notes that the cancer was detected during a scheduled health screening at a public Beijing hospital. Sihamoni and his 86-year-old mother, Queen Mother Norodom Monineath, traveled to the Chinese capital at the end of February for their annual routine health check-ups, a long-standing practice for the royal family.

Notably, the king’s official message did not disclose details about the stage of his cancer or the specific treatment plan he will follow. Medical consensus shows that prostate cancer has a high survival rate when caught in early stages, with the American Cancer Society estimating that roughly one out of every eight men globally will receive a prostate cancer diagnosis at some point in their lifetimes.

This diagnosis carries personal historical context for the Cambodian royal family: Sihamoni’s father, former King Norodom Sihanouk, was also diagnosed with prostate cancer back in 1993, and similarly traveled to China for ongoing medical care. Sihanouk ultimately lived to 89 years old, passing away in Beijing in 2012, nearly 20 years after his initial diagnosis.

Sihamoni ascended to Cambodia’s constitutional throne in October 2004, just one week after his father’s voluntary abdication. As a constitutional monarch, his role is almost entirely ceremonial, and he has long maintained a deliberately low public profile across his nearly 20-year reign. Before taking the crown, he represented Cambodia as an ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and gained early recognition as a trained classical ballet dancer. He currently remains unmarried and has no children.

A resurgent measles outbreak in Bangladesh has claimed the lives of approximately 100 children and triggered more than 7,500 suspected infections across the country, prompting health authorities to roll out an urgent mass immunization campaign targeting high-risk communities. Official data released ahead of the campaign launch on Sunday confirms the rapid spread of the vaccine-preventable disease, which had been on the brink of elimination in the South Asian nation for nearly two decades.

The emergency campaign, inaugurated by Health and Family Welfare Minister Sardar Md Sakhawat Hossain at a public health facility near the capital Dhaka, will prioritize more than 1 million children aged six months to five years across 18 hard-hit districts that have recorded the highest infection rates. Following this targeted push, a national measles-rubella vaccination initiative will roll out to all remaining districts starting May 3, with 30 of the most severely affected localities already rolling out immunization services ahead of the official schedule.

Discrepancies in official death figures reflect gaps in diagnostic access across the country: the ministry has confirmed 17 measles-linked deaths, with 113 additional suspected deaths. Of the total suspected infections, more than 6,400 are recorded in children under five, the age group most vulnerable to life-threatening complications from the disease. Public health officials note that most unconfirmed deaths occurred before patients could receive diagnostic testing, meaning the actual death toll is likely closer to the 100 suspected fatalities currently cited.

“Compared with past years, the number of affected children is higher, and the death toll is higher too,” explained Halimur Rashid, director of Bangladesh’s Communicable Disease Control unit, in an interview with Agence France-Presse.

Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that Bangladesh saw its largest recorded measles outbreak in 2005, with nearly 26,000 suspected cases. After that peak, case numbers dropped steadily for nearly 20 years, hitting historic lows before the 2026 resurgence.

Health experts point to a mix of interconnected factors that allowed the outbreak to take hold. Rashid cited systemic gaps including widespread vaccine shortages, while other public health leaders note that a scheduled 2024 national measles vaccination drive was delayed by widespread political unrest that ultimately led to the ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government.

Officials add another layer of vulnerability: while the national immunization schedule recommends a first measles dose at nine months of age, a large share of the recent infections have occurred in infants as young as six months, who have not yet been scheduled for vaccination.

Mahmudur Rahman, head of the National Verification Committee of Measles and Rubella, acknowledged that the country missed a key public health target set years prior: “We committed to reducing the number [of measles cases] to zero by December 2025 but failed to achieve the target due to poor vaccination programs.”

Tajul Islam A. Bari, a former senior official with Bangladesh’s Expanded Programme on Immunization and a leading public health expert, said institutional missteps contributed directly to the crisis. “Although funds had been allocated for vaccine purchases, authorities had failed to procure them,” Bari explained. “Now we see the result — the situation is scary.”

The Bangladesh outbreak aligns with a global trend of rising measles cases and deaths in recent years. The WHO’s latest 2024 global data estimates that as many as 95,000 people died from measles that year, the vast majority unvaccinated or under-vaccinated children under five.

As defined by the WHO, measles is one of the most contagious viral diseases on Earth, spread through respiratory droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes. While it can infect people of any age, it disproportionately affects young children and can cause severe life-threatening complications including brain swelling and acute respiratory distress. No targeted antiviral treatment exists for measles after infection, making preventive vaccination the only effective public health intervention to stop outbreaks.

A deadly measles outbreak that has claimed the lives of more than 100 children in less than a month has prompted Bangladesh to roll out an urgent immunization campaign, as public health authorities work to contain the fast-spreading infection. In a collaborative effort between the Bangladeshi government and global health partners including the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, the campaign began Sunday targeting children between 6 months and 5 years old across 18 high-risk districts. The initiative will expand to all regions of the country in phased stages starting next month, according to a joint official statement.

As of mid-March, Bangladeshi health officials have recorded more than 7,500 suspected measles cases, with over 900 confirmed infections in the South Asian nation of 170 million people. Rana Flowers, UNICEF’s representative in Bangladesh, emphasized the organization’s deep alarm over the sharp surge in cases, which disproportionately endangers the country’s youngest and most medically vulnerable populations. “This resurgence highlights critical immunity gaps, particularly among zero-dose and under-vaccinated children, while infections among infants under nine months, who are not yet eligible for routine vaccination, are especially alarming,” Flowers said.

Per WHO guidelines, measles is an extremely contagious airborne viral illness that triggers fever, respiratory distress, and a distinct full-body rash. The infection can lead to severe life-threatening complications, particularly for young children. Widespread vaccination is the only effective way to halt transmission, but WHO data notes that 95% population coverage is required to achieve herd immunity and stop sustained spread.

Bangladesh’s current Health Minister Sardar Mohammed Sakhawat Husain told Parliament Monday that the current outbreak stems from systemic mismanagement and failures by previous administrations. He alleged that the ousted government of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, followed by the interim administration led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, failed to maintain adequate vaccine stockpiles, leading to shortages that affected measles vaccines and six other routine childhood immunizations. The ongoing immunization program was further disrupted by the country’s recent period of political upheaval: Hasina was removed from office in a mass popular uprising in 2024, and Yunus’s interim government only transferred power to a newly elected administration after February’s general election.

Public health officials are now urging parents to seek immediate hospital care for any child showing suspected measles symptoms, warning against self-treatment with unregulated medications from local shopkeepers. F. A. Asma Khan, deputy director of Dhaka’s Infectious Diseases Hospital, stressed that any child experiencing a high fever above 38.3°C (101°F) should be evaluated by professional medical staff immediately. “Instead, they must take the child to a hospital as soon as possible, because our medical officers are capable of providing proper basic treatment,” Khan said.

Bangladesh has made significant progress in childhood immunization over the past four decades: following the launch of a national mass immunization campaign in 1979, the country raised full immunization coverage from just 2% to 81.6% today. Still, UNICEF warned in a 2023 report that despite these gains, stark immunization disparities remain across different population groups and regions, leaving millions of children at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases like measles.

A devastating measles outbreak sweeping across Bangladesh has claimed more than 100 lives, the vast majority of them young children, since mid-March, prompting public health authorities to roll out an urgent mass vaccination campaign targeting the nation’s most vulnerable youth. Officials fear this outbreak could become the deadliest wave of the highly contagious airborne disease the country has seen in recent decades.

Official data from Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health confirms that more than 7,500 suspected measles cases have been recorded since 15 March, with over 900 of those cases already laboratory-confirmed. Local media reports highlight just how dramatic this surge is: in all of 2025, Bangladesh recorded only 125 total confirmed measles cases.

For decades, Bangladesh has run routine childhood immunization programs to protect against measles, but this sudden outbreak has laid bare critical gaps in the country’s vaccination infrastructure that have sparked widespread alarm among global and local public health experts.

“Vaccines are foundational to child survival,” Rana Flowers, UNICEF’s representative in Bangladesh, said in an official statement released Sunday. “The current measles outbreak is putting thousands of children, especially the youngest and most vulnerable, at serious risk.”

Under Bangladesh’s standard public health protocols, routine measles vaccination is administered to infants at nine months of age. But Shahriar Sajjad, deputy director of Bangladesh’s Health Department, told BBC Bangla that roughly one-third of all infected patients in the current outbreak are younger than nine months old – putting them outside the age eligibility for standard immunization before they were exposed.

Flowers noted that infections among these too-young infants are “especially alarming” given their weaker immune systems and higher risk of life-threatening complications.

Beyond routine annual vaccinations, Bangladesh has historically held targeted mass measles vaccination campaigns every four years to boost coverage and close immunity gaps. But those scheduled campaigns have been derailed by successive crises since 2020. Sajjad told BBC Bangla that the first disruption came from the global COVID-19 pandemic, followed by widespread domestic political unrest that delayed planning and execution.

Bangladesh saw major political upheaval in 2024, when large-scale anti-government protests led to the ousting of long-serving prime minister Sheikh Hasina. An interim caretaker government governed the country until a new administration was elected in February 2026, creating months of political and administrative uncertainty that disrupted public health programming. A planned mass vaccination campaign that was scheduled for April 2026 never launched, Sajjad confirmed.

The English-language Bangladeshi newspaper *Daily Star* also reported that procurement challenges have led to widespread shortages of routine vaccines, including measles doses, across the country. Many political observers and local stakeholders have blamed the former interim government, which oversaw the rollout of a new vaccine procurement system, for the current supply shortfalls. But UNICEF pushed back on framing the crisis as the result of a single failure, noting that measles resurgences almost always stem from accumulated gaps in immunization coverage over time, rather than one isolated error.

“Bangladesh has a strong history of high immunisation coverage, but even small disruptions can lead to the gradual accumulation of immunity gaps over time,” the organization explained in its statement.

Working alongside global health partners UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO), Bangladesh’s new government has now launched an emergency vaccination campaign targeting both measles and rubella – a milder disease that shares similar symptomatic traits with measles. The campaign launched Sunday, and will roll out across 30 high-risk sub-districts (called upazilas) nationwide, aiming to reach more than 1.2 million children between the ages of six months and five years.

UNICEF confirmed that the emergency drive will prioritize children who have previously missed routine immunization doses, who face the highest risk of severe illness and life-threatening complications from the virus. Special focus is being placed on two high-risk, densely populated areas: Dhaka, the overcrowded national capital, and Cox’s Bazar, which hosts massive, crowded camps for Rohingya refugees fleeing violence in neighboring Myanmar.

Beyond the vaccination push, national health authorities are also launching public education campaigns, distributing informative infographics to teach communities how to identify early measles symptoms and prevent further spread. Measles spreads easily through airborne respiratory particles, and can cause severe neurological complications, organ damage, and death even in previously healthy children. Common early symptoms include high fever, red watery eyes, sore throat, cough, and sneezing.

Global public health data underscores the ongoing threat of measles worldwide. According to the WHO, an estimated 95,000 people died from measles globally in 2024, more than 90% of whom were children under five years old. The disease is entirely preventable through safe, effective vaccination, but herd immunity requires a 95% population vaccination rate to stop sustained community transmission.

Over the past 20 years, global public health efforts drove a dramatic decline in global measles cases and deaths: total annual cases fell from 38 million in 2000 to 11 million in 2024, a 71% drop. But the WHO has repeatedly warned of a growing global resurgence as routine vaccination coverage dropped following the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2026 report in the medical journal *The Lancet* found that 2024 and 2025 saw the highest number of national measles outbreaks recorded worldwide in more than 20 years.

Outbreaks have surged across parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom in recent years. In many Western nations, growing anti-vaccine skepticism that expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic has driven down vaccination rates below the herd immunity threshold. In February 2026, for example, a measles outbreak at multiple schools in north London prompted UK public health officials to issue an urgent reminder to parents to ensure their children are fully vaccinated.

A 47-year-old Turkish woman living and working in Southwest China’s Chongqing has made an extraordinary full recovery from aggressive diffuse large B-cell lymphoma after receiving personalized, multidisciplinary care at a leading local public hospital, a case that showcases the high quality of China’s international medical services for foreign residents.

Going by the pseudonym Zeynep, the patient was first admitted to the Hematology Department of the First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University on December 31, 2024, presenting with a severe case of the blood cancer marked by widespread lymph node involvement. Medical teams moved quickly to run diagnostic tests, confirming the diagnosis and flagging the urgent need for immediate therapeutic intervention. By the beginning of January 2025, Zeynep’s condition deteriorated rapidly, triggering life-threatening acute respiratory failure that required intensive care support.

Faced with the serious health crisis, Zeynep and her family initially planned to travel back to Turkiye to complete treatment, a common choice for many foreign expats facing major illness abroad. But after receiving positive feedback and endorsement of the Chongqing hospital’s proposed treatment plan from medical experts in Turkiye, the family chose to stay and proceed with care in China.

To deliver the best possible outcome for Zeynep, the hospital assembled a cross-departmental multidisciplinary treatment team drawing specialists from eight clinical and research units, including pathology, clinical molecular diagnosis, and critical care medicine. This collaborative approach allowed clinicians to address every complication of Zeynep’s case and adapt treatment to her specific health profile.

According to Zhang Hongbin, chief physician in the hospital’s Hematology Department and lead of Zeynep’s care team, clinicians implemented a customized first-line regimen called Pola R-CHP, which integrates multiple targeted cancer therapies. Unlike standard treatment protocols, this personalized approach is designed to boost long-term survival outcomes for patients with high-risk diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Zhang explained that the tailored therapy is projected to raise the patient’s five-year survival rate from the 60 percent average associated with traditional regimens to 80 percent. After weeks of coordinated care, Zeynep achieved a remarkable recovery that has been hailed as a testament to China’s advancing precision oncology capabilities and patient-centered care for international residents.

China has marked a transformative milestone in advancing domestic cancer care, with researchers at the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongguan, Guangdong province announcing they have achieved full capability to produce life-saving alpha-emitting medical isotopes. For years, China has relied on costly, supply-volatile imports of these critical materials, creating a major bottleneck in access to cutting-edge cancer treatment. The new domestic production capacity is set to resolve this gap, bringing next-generation targeted cancer therapy within reach for far more patients.

Called the “nuclear warheads” of modern oncology, alpha isotopes are the core component of next-generation radiopharmaceuticals that deliver lethal radiation directly to tumor cells while minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue. The CSNS team has confirmed it can produce three of the most clinically essential alpha isotopes: radium-223, actinium-225, and lead-212, all of which have well-documented effectiveness in treating hard-to-manage late-stage prostate cancer and neuroendocrine tumors.

Wang Sheng, director of the Spallation Neutron Source Science Center and a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of High Energy Physics, emphasized the urgent public health need for this advancement, noting that China records nearly 5 million new cancer diagnoses annually — accounting for 25% of the global total — with an overall mortality rate above 50%.

Unlike conventional radiation therapy, which uses long-range radiation that can pass through healthy tissue and cause unintended damage, alpha particles function like precision short-range heavy artillery. Once inside a cancer cell, alpha radiation releases enough energy to break both strands of the cell’s DNA, creating irreversible damage that the cell cannot repair. Wang added that the treatment also delivers a valuable “bystander effect”: dying cancer cells release signals that trigger the death of adjacent malignant cells, even if those cells were not directly targeted by radiation.

Historically, medical alpha isotopes have been produced almost exclusively in nuclear reactors. But the CSNS research team developed an innovative alternative approach using a high-energy linear accelerator. By directing a high-powered proton beam at a target constructed from thorium, a naturally occurring abundant metal, researchers are able to extract the exact isotopes required for clinical use.

Dai Xiongxin, who leads the project’s industrialization initiative, explained that this new production method offers multiple advantages over traditional reactor-based production. It eliminates the need for highly enriched uranium, a material that carries inherent nuclear proliferation risks, making the process both safer and more cost-effective. “It offers flexible production capacity, broader access to raw materials, and significantly lower costs,” Dai noted.

Rigorous quality testing has confirmed that the domestically produced isotopes achieve a purity level of over 99%, matching the high quality standard of imported international supplies. The project does face one key logistical challenge, however: alpha isotopes have extremely short half-lives, decaying within days or even hours of production, making long-term storage and long-distance transportation impossible. To overcome this barrier, the CSNS center signed a strategic cooperation agreement with the China Isotope & Radiation Corporation over the weekend to build a complete localized industrial chain for production and distribution in Guangdong province.

A purpose-built dedicated production line is currently under construction at the site. Once the facility reaches full operational capacity by 2031, it is projected to produce enough isotopes to supply nearly 1 million patient treatments per year, marking a major leap forward in China’s quest for self-sufficiency in advanced medical resources and expanding access to life-saving cancer care across the country.