Beijing, China - June 26, 2017
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1. Various of press conference by National Health and Family Planning Commission, reporters

2. SOUNDBITE (Chinese) Xie Ruiqian, researcher, Chinese Health Education Center, National Health and Family Planning Commission:
"People are advised not to carry out diagnoses and treatments on themselves by themselves simply based on the online health information. Diagnoses and treatments given by non-professionals are wrong and will only delay diagnoses and treatments by the doctors. Wrong diagnoses and treatments threats the life of people suffering serious diseases. Wrong therapies and medicines have side effects that affects health and even threats life."

FILE: China - Date Unknown
3. Various of doctors doing optometry for students

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4. Various of people, employees at hospitals

China's National Health and Family Planning Commission said on Monday that it will strengthen monitoring online health information and take action to crack down on false, exaggerated or unscientific health information.

It also instructed the national health hotline "12320" to strengthen supervision and collect reports from the masses about relevant cases.

Researcher Xie Ruiqian with the commission's Chinese Health Education Center, suggested ways for the masses to identify reliable and unreliable health-information platforms on the Internet. He said this should be done by checking whether the platforms have cooperation with authoritative medical institutions, whether they are edited by authoritative medical and health professionals, and, moreover, whether they supply make-believe information or even claim to "be able to cure all and different bad diseases".

Reliable health information should come from authoritative sources that are generally recognized and supported by experts in relevant fields, said Xie.

"People are advised not to carry out diagnoses and treatments on themselves by themselves simply based on the online health information. Diagnoses and treatments given by non-professionals are wrong and will only delay diagnoses and treatments by the doctors. Wrong diagnoses and treatments threats the life of people suffering serious diseases. Wrong therapies and medicines have side effects that affects health and even threats life," Xie added.