News

The Czech Republic has the highest per capita incidence of kidney cancer of any country in the world, the news website iDnes.cz reported, citing the League Against Cancer, which is focusing on that form of the disease in its campaigning this year. The renal cancer rate in the Czech Republic is twice the average rate for the European Union. There is also a relatively high incidence of it in neighbouring Bavaria.

Around 2,000 people are diagnosed with kidney cancer in the Czech Republic every year, with around 800 dying of it annually.

There are currently three people in the Czech Republic suspected of contracting the Chinese coronavirus. Two cases are reported from the region of Opava and one person is under observation in the hospital in the Moravian town of Uherské Hradiště. Another two patients who had been tested in Prague and in České Budějovice have been confirmed to not have the virus.

The fast-spreading infection, which causes pneumonia-like symptoms, has killed more than 100 people in China and infected at least 4,500 since its discovery in the city of Wuhan in December.

Following a Security Council meeting on Monday to discuss responses to the crisis, the Czech government announced a number of special steps in connection with the virus, focused on people arriving by air on Czech territory.

The organs of 288 deceased donors were used to save patients in the Czech Republic in 2019. That is a record for a single year, according to figures released by the Czech Transplanting Coordinating Centre on Monday.

Prague’s Institute for Clinical and Experimental Medicine, one of the largest such centres in Europe, carried out around 70 percent of all the country’s transplant surgeries, transplanting 540 organs last year.

The most common transplant operations were of kidney, liver and heart transplants.

An official ceremony took place at the Czech Senate on Monday marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The gathering was attended by politicians, representatives of the country’s Jewish and Roma communities and people who survived Nazi concentration camps.

A speech written by the late speaker of the Senate Jaroslav Kubera and delivered by the Civic Democrat senator Jiří Oberfalzer warned against the rising hatred, fanaticism and antisemitism in Europe.

The event was held on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi death camps, where over 1.5 million Jews lost their lives.

Close to six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, with 250 000 of them from the former Czechoslovakia.