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Hundreds of public health experts gathered last week in Vietnam to talk about how to link public health and human rights.

The right to health is affirmed in numerous United Nations agreements.

But ideas about public health and human rights often come into conflict, particularly when it comes to activities many governments consider criminal, like drug use.

And as Matt Steinglass reports from Hanoi, some governments are especially sensitive to the issue of human rights.

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From this month, children over the age of six months in Vietnam are required to wear helmets if traveling with their parents on motorcycles.

It's a move that's been widely welcomed.

But there are concerns that the market is being flooded with sub-standard helmets - that are about five times cheaper - and that either carry fake quality stamps - or none at all.

Radio Australia’s Desmond Ang has more.

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When people worry about carbon emissions causing climate change, they usually blame automobiles and airplanes, or coal-fired power plants.

But one of the world’s biggest sources of carbon emissions is much smaller: crude fires used for cooking.

Scientists say wood and coal-fired stoves used by billions of people in developing countries are a major cause of global warming.

In Hanoi, Matt Steinglass reports on an organization helping poor people make the switch to more efficient and cleaner stoves.

For forty years, relations between the United States and Vietnam have revolved around the Vietnam War and the slow reconciliation that followed.

But the inauguration of Barack Obama may mark the end of that era. President Obama was just eleven when the war ended.

John McCain, the man he defeated, was a fighter pilot whose political identity was forged during the years he spent in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.

As Vietnam and America finally put the war behind them, Matt Steinglass talks to one Vietnamese family whose connection to that history is unusually close.

Dinh Thi Hoa lives with her husband Hung in a tiny house on a back alley in Hanoi’s old quarter.