E: encounter a section with no package, E:problem with merge list

[Fajar Ichwan Noor]

I'm using linux mint 17 (Qiana) cinnamon. When i update, using the command --> sudo apt-get update
I got these error messages below:

E: Encountered a section with no Package: header
E: Problem with Mergelist /var/lib/apt/lists/packages.linuxmint.com_dists_qiana_upstream_i18n_Translation-en
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened

I encountered these similar problems already 3 times. So I search on the internet, and found that many people already encountered such kind of error messages. Some blogs and forums suggested this command below to solve the problem.

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -vf
sudo apt-get update

while others suggested:

sudo dpkg --configure -a
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade

I tried those suggestion above and with no luck, still failed and got the error messages. So I go straight to /var/lib/apt/lists and found that there is a folder name partial with files in it. So i add option recursive in the command:

sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/* -rvf
sudo apt-get update

It works like charm. But I've done that 3 times already. Is there a better solution? What cause the problem? Why is this still happened? (i see that this problem arose since mint julia)