Lao Voices

I was at the food market the other day and saw some mozzarella cheese made from Buffalo milk. I thought that was interesting and purchased one. It has an interesting taste, very creamy but doesn’t have the aftertaste of cow milk cheese at all. It actually reminded me of young coconut meat. [...]

One of my favorite apples is the Fuji apple.  According to Wikipedia, Fuji apple is an apple cultivar developed by growers at the Tohoku Research Station in Fujisaki, Aomori, Japan in the late 1930s and brought to market in 1962. It is a cross between two American apple varieties, the Red Delicious and old Virginia [...]

A few weeks ago one Japanese NGO traveled to Champassak Province with their mobile clinic to provide free health services for those that were living too far from a hospital and also can’t afford certain procedures. There were two teams, one is a surgical team and another a dental team. The two teams visited several [...]

Bridge the Gap is “group of surgeons from the Netherlands who operate as many patients with a cleft palate as they can while training Vietnamese and Lao surgeons and dentists.” In January 2008, the team traveled to Laos for the third year in a row to perform medical treatments for people with face deformities at [...]

The Land of Smiles is not only known for tourism. How about checking into a Thai hospital in Bangkok for a fraction of the cost in the US? I wonder how much it would cost to have my braces done there. Maybe I can live in Laos and then cross over for a monthly check [...]

As a follow up to the long and prosperous post, it was time to elaborate on the costs of health care in the US. For this, I use a report of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality that takes hospital charges as a proxy for the rate of increases and to show where the [...]

Wishing everyone a healthy and prosperous new year!
Talking about health and prosperity: below a graph where the average life expectancy is displayed per country versus the costs of health care in that particular country. Conclusion: If you want to live long at reasonable costs you might want to go to Japan.

Shorter lived and immensely [...]

For those that use time as an excuse for not exercising to better heath, say no more because getting healthier doesn’t have to mean an outrageous time commitment. I came across good tips in a Thai magazine that experts say 60 seconds can improve your health. So try these tips…

Wash your hands after [...]

On a foggy morning of November 7 th, a 901-foot container ship sideswiped the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The crash spilled 58,000 gallons of fuel into San Francisco Bay. Authorities shut down many of the beaches, including Baker Beach, Crissy Field, China Beach, Kirby Cove and Fort Point due to the contamination. [...]

Video description: HOUAY NAMIEN, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, 16 November 2007 – Worldwide, measles kills more children than any other preventable disease, and Laos suffers regular outbreaks, including two this year that killed at least 10 children.
UNICEF Representative in Lao PDR Laila Ismail-Khan said that the government’s commitment to eliminate measles by 2012 was cost-effective [...]

Lao movie about bird flu, produced by Lao Art Media.
Part 1

After the recent Bird Flu outbreaks in Laos and the fear of human-to-human transfer of the H5N1 virus, and watching movies such as Grindhouse and 28 week later I started wondering what would happen to a society when a fullblown lethal virus would spread.
Oddly enough, the closest proxy that delivers insight to an outbreak comes [...]

I read an interesting post at Amphone’s blog this morning on Dragon Boat Race 2007 and want to share a bit of history behind the festive event, which I posted at the old Laoplanet forum in the past.
Dragon boat racing began more than 2000 years ago on the banks of the life-sustaining rivers in [...]

It made me sick to read Chinese Pork Buns posted by Salat earlier, and who said that no news is good news, this one is…I feel a lot better…No cardboard in buns.
BEIJING, China (Reuters) — Beijing police have detained a television reporter for allegedly fabricating an investigative story about steamed buns stuffed with cardboard at [...]

I think most of us knew that Aloe Vera (also known as Varn Harng Khar in Lao, Varn Harng Jora Kae in Thai) has been used externally to treat various skin conditions such as cuts, burns, and eczema. It has alleged that sap from Aloe Vera eases pain and reduces inflammation, might be because [...]