Health

KUALA LUMPUR: China will no longer host the 2023 Asian Cup finals due to the Covid-19 situation in the country, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) said on Saturday, with Beijing’s strict zero-Covid strategy dealing another blow to the country’s sporting ambitions. Authorities in China are pursuing a strategy of stamping out the virus entirely, which includes rapid lockdowns and mass …

SEOUL: North Korea announced 21 new “fever” deaths on Saturday and said more than half a million people had been sickened nationwide, two days after confirming its first cases of Covid-19. Despite activating its “maximum emergency quarantine system” to slow the spread of disease through its unvaccinated population, North Korea is now reporting tens of thousands of new cases daily. …

A one-year-old boy from North Waziristan was left paralysed by wild poliovirus in the third such case reported in Pakistan this year, it emerged on Sunday. According to a statement issued by the Ministry of Health, the wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) was confirmed in the boy from Miranshah on May 15 by the polio laboratory at the National Institute …

The National Institute of Health (NIH) on Sunday decided to increase the scope of the ongoing Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) of inbound travellers at international airports across the country in view of the global coronavirus situation, it said in a statement. In a series of tweets today, the institute — which has been heading Pakistan’s Covid-19 response after the National …

ISLAMABAD/RAWALPINDI: The Ministry of National Health Services (NHS) and National Institute of Health (NIH) have issued separate advisories for people and educational institutions, outlining measures to be taken to protect oneself from the effects of the prevailing heatwave in the country as some regions recording temperatures of 50°C. According to the Met Office, the temperature recorded in Rawalpindi and Islamabad on …

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tested positive for Covid-19 with moderate symptoms, her office said in a statement on Saturday. She will not be in parliament for the government’s emissions reduction plan on Monday and the budget on Thursday, but, “travel arrangements for her trade mission to the United States are unaffected at this stage,” the statement said. Ardern …

WASHINGTON: Foreign Min­­­­ister Bilawal Bhutto-Zar­da­ri said on Thursday that Pakistan’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic was firmly grounded in scientific evidence and logic. Mr Bhutto-Zardari voiced this praise at a global summit on the pandemic, co-hosted by the White House. “Health security, especially in times of pandemic, is indivisible. Microorganisms do not reco­gnize nation-states. For them, we are all the …

At least one person confirmed to have Covid-19 has died in North Korea and hundreds of thousands have shown fever symptoms, state media said on Friday, offering hints at the potentially dire scale of country’s first confirmed outbreak of the pandemic. The data represents an unprecedented admission of an “explosive” outbreak in a country that had previously reported no confirmed …

PESHAWAR: With officials blaming ‘fake’ finger marking for polio resurgence in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, national health services minister Abdul Qadir Patel on Thursday visited the houses of two new polio cases in North Waziristan tribal district and ordered their rehabilitation. The minister, who was accompanied by a team of the National Polio Programme, said it was heartbreaking to see a two-year-old …

The country was in the grip of a heatwave on Friday, with parts of the nation previously scalded by temperatures of nearly 50 degrees Celsius as officials warned of acute water shortages and a health threat. Swathes of the country have been smothered by high temperatures since late April, in extreme weather the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has warned is …