Stories about Vietnam from October, 2005
Vietnam: Construction
Virtual-Doug watches a house being built in Vietnam.
Vietnam: In the Soup
On noodlepie‘s suggestion, soup-obsessed No Star Where tries Vietnam's famous noodle soup pho at a pho chain he derided as McPho and is pleasantly surprised.
Vietnam: Know Your Greens
Food blog noodlepie asks for help identifying what's in those sideplates of tasty greens and herbs that come with meals in Vietnam. Help them here.
Vietnam: Lone Star
A Viet soul in Texas rails against outsiders misunderstanding Vietnam. “We are 1 people, 1 country now, and don't try to think us as two countries anymore.” Meanwhile, American blogger in Hanoi No Star Where confirms as well that “The war is in the past.”
Effect Measure on Facing the Global Bird Flu Threat
With recent reports of avian flu in Western Europe, the disease is clearly no longer East Asia's problem. It's a dilemma for the world. Last week I emailed Revere, the pseudonymous leader of Effect Measure, a public health group blog. Since its inception in late 2004, Effect Measure has been covering the global response to avian flu. My goal was to discuss the pandemic fears and what the world -- and ordinary people -- can do to prepare for it.
Revere, an environmental epidemiologist in a senior faculty position at a major research university, has 40 years of experience in medicine and public health. He is also one of the individuals behind the Flu Wiki, an Internet-based experiment in community mobilization and knowledge-pooling to face the feared epidemic. He paints an alarming picture. "If a pandemic is going to happen (and we don't know how to predict if it will or not with certainty), it will happen whatever we do," he writes. "There will be no "outside" for help to come from, so each community needs to prepare to cope on its own." In previous flu pandemics, hundreds of thousands of people went sick or died, leading to massive disruptions as workers failed to show up to work and instead surged into ill-equipped and ill-prepared hospitals ill-prepared.
Revere sees two big tasks ahead: managing the consequences of a potential pandemic, and building (or rebuilding) the world's rotting public health infrastructure.
Cambodia: Secret Treaty
The Cambodia-Vietnam border negotiations continue to be a hot topic in the local blogosphere. Dissident blog KI Media (“dedicated to publishing sensitive information about Cambodia”) offers a copy of a secret treaty addendum it says Phnom Penh signed with Hanoi, while Lux Mean at Cambodia Blog is wondering whether the...
East Asia: Bird Flu Fowl
Effect Measure is a blog run by public health experts and epidemiologists. They are very worried about what they call the bird flu iceberg.
Vietnam: Twenty Reasons to Smile
Our Man in Hanoi lists twenty things that make him smile in Vietnam.
Vietnam: Indians in Hanoi
No Star Where‘s search for traces of the Indian community in Vietnam leads to a discovery that poet Rabindranath Tagore had once visited Saigon.
Vietnam: Foreign-backed J-programs
Vietnam Journalism notes the rapid proliferation in recent years of journalism training programs backed by foreign institutions, but laments that “a number of participants of these courses just go to classes to… nod their heads. They leave behind immediately what they have just been taught,” the article says.
