More than 50 percent of food items and beverages sold on city streets are found contaminated with various groups of bacteria called coliform, said a study. “More than 50 percent street foods and beverages are contaminated by coliform while more than one- third street foods is unhygienic by faecal pathogen (E.coli),” said the study. The International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), an international health research organization, today unveiled the information at a programme at its Sasakawa Aud...

More than 350,000 babies are born globally every day. Yet in many cultures it remains a mystical and deeply superstitious act. Now expertise from the UK’s TV hit Call the Midwife is helping people in Bangladesh to break the taboo and improve the health of mothers and babies. Twenty-two-year-old Bimola is lying covered in robes on the floor of her home. She is surrounded by two women anxiously waiting to help her through the birth of her first child. It is a tense moment and expectations are riding high, BBC reports. “Cut, cut, cut!...

South Korean builder Taeyoung Engineering & Construction Co. said Monday it has clinched a 55.28 billion won (US$49.76 million) order to build a water treatment plant in Bangladesh. Under the deal with Chittagong Water Supply and Sewerage Authority, a semi-autonomous municipal utility that provides water supply and sanitation services in Bangladesh, Taeyoung will construct a water treatment facility in the southeastern port region of Modunaghat in the South Asian country, the company said in a regulatory filing. The project, w...

Giving multivitamins to pregnant wormen in the developing world could avert a leading cause of pre-term birth and infant mortality, a study in this week’s Journal of the American Medical Association says. [caption id="attachment_11565" align="alignleft" width="300"] FILE - A woman holds her 22-day-old grandson as she walks on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, Jan. 22, 2014.[/caption] Researchers at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, studied the benefits of giving multivitamins to 45,000 women in rural Ba...

Between 1990 and 2013, global life expectancy increased by nearly 5.8 years in men and 6.6 years in women, reports Medical News Today based on a new analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013 published in The Lancet. “The progress we are seeing against a variety of illnesses and injuries is good, even remarkable, but we can and must do even better,” says lead author Dr Christopher Murray, professor of Global Health at the University of Washington. “The huge increase in collective action and funding given to the major infectious diseases such as diarrhea, measles, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria has had a real impact,” he says.