Worst floods in a decade in China, 30,000 trapped
Floods caused by heavy rains in northeastern China stranded tens of thousands of residents without power Wednesday, as the worst flooding in more than a decade continued to besiege many areas of the country.
Floods this year have killed at least 928 people with 477 missing and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, the State Flood Control and Drought Prevention office reported. More heavy rains were expected for the southeast, southwest and northeast parts of the country through Thursday.
About 30,000 residents in Kouqian town were trapped in their homes after torrential rains drenched the northeastern province of Jilin on Wednesday, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Water began flooding the town after the nearby Xingshan Reservoir and the Wende and Songhua rivers overflowed and rescue crews were delivering supplies by boat and moving people to higher ground, state television reported.
Flooding has hit areas all over China. Thousands of workers sandbagged riverbanks and checked reservoirs in preparation for potential floods expected to flow from the swollen Yangtze and Han rivers, an official with the Yangtze Water Resources Commission said Wednesday. He gave only his surname, Zhang, as is common with Chinese officials.
"Right now, the Han river in Hubei province is on the verge breaching warning levels," Zhang said.
The Han is expected to rise this week to its highest level in two decades, Xinhua reported. The flood threat was greater than usual because the Yangtze, into which the Han flows, was also reaching peak levels, it said.
Workers were prepared to blast holes in the Han embankment to divert flood waters into a low-lying area of farms and fish ponds, from which more than 5,000 people were evacuated, Xinhua said.
Although China experiences heavy rains every summer, flooding this year is the worst in more than a decade because the flood-prone Yangtze River Basin has seen 15 percent more rain than in an average year, Duan Yihong, director of the National Meteorological Center, said in a transcript of an interview Wednesday posted on the Xinhua website.
"Rains should begin to slow down in August, but it is hard to predict now what exactly will happen, said Duan. "We have to be vigilant and closely monitor the weather ... do a better job of forecasting."
Thousands of rescuers in central China's Henan province searched for survivors Wednesday after a bridge collapsed from heaving flooding in the Yi River over the weekend, killing 37 people with 29 missing, Xinhua reported.
Floods have also put China's massive Three Gorges Dam to the test. On Wednesday morning, the dam's water flow reached 1.96 million cubic feet (56,000 cubic meters) per second, the biggest peak flow this year, with the water level reaching 518 feet (158 meters), Xinhua said, about 10 percent less than the dam's maximum capacity.
Chinese officials have for years boasted the dam, the world's largest hydroelectric project, would end centuries of devastating floods along the Yangtze.
Around China, a total of 875,000 homes have been destroyed, 9.61 million people evacuated, and 22 million acres (8.76 million hectares) of crops ruined in this year's flooding, according to the state flood control office.
China's worst flooding in recent years occurred in 1998, when 4,150 people were killed, most along the Yangtze.
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China is seen variously as an ancient civilization extending over a large area in East Asia, a nation and/or a multinational entity.
China is one of the world's oldest civilizations and is regarded as the oldest continuous civilization.[1][2] Prior to the nineteenth century, it possessed one of the most advanced society and economy in the world through successive dynasties though it subsequently missed the industrial revolution and began to decline.[3][4] In the 19th and 20th century, imperialism, internal weakness and civil wars damaged the country and its economy and led to the overthrow of imperial rule.
In 1949, when major combat ended in the Chinese Civil War, two political entities emerged having the term "China" in their names:
The People's Republic of China (PRC), established in 1949, commonly known as China, has control over mainland China and the largely self-governing territories of Hong Kong (since 1997) and Macau (since 1999).
The Republic of China (ROC) established in 1912 in mainland China, now commonly known as Taiwan, has control over the islands of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu.
In the 1950s, change to economic policies in Taiwan transformed the island into a technology-oriented industrialized developed economy after a period of high growth rates and rapid industrialization. In mainland China, in the 1970s, reforms known as the Four Modernizations modernized the agriculture, industry, technology and defense, vastly raising living standards, and making the PRC one of the great powers.[5][6][7]
Historically, China's cultural sphere has extended across East Asia as a whole, with Chinese religion, customs, and writing systems being adopted to varying degrees by neighbors such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam. Through its history, China was the source of many major inventions.[8] It has also one of the world's oldest written language systems. The first evidence of human presence in the region was found at the Zhoukoudian cave. It is one of the earliest known specimens of Homo erectus, now commonly known as the Peking Man, estimated to have lived from 300,000 to 780,000 years ago.
Experts Divided on Whether to Treat Thyroid Cancer
Immediate treatment of thyroid cancer that has not spread beyond the gland doesn't make much difference in long-term survival, according to a study that quickly aroused controversy.
"One thing that really surprised me was how good survival was," said Dr. Louise Davies, lead author of a report on the study, published in the May issue of Archives of Otolaryngology. "We found that for cancers of any size that are confined to the gland, the 20-year survival rate for those that got immediate treatment was 99 percent, and for those not treated immediately, in the first year or even longer after diagnosis, 20-year survival was 97 percent."
That finding "led me as a surgeon to think about the risks versus the benefits of surgery for such thyroid cancers," Davies said. "It certainly made me feel a lot less anxious about working with these patients to watch small thyroid modules and not biopsy every one. I'm a lot less worried than I used to be that there will be a cancer in that module that is going to kill a person."
That conclusion drew a quick rebuttal from Dr. Erich M. Sturgis, an associate professor of head and neck surgery at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and co-author of an accompanying editorial.
"Our concern is that a general person reading that paper will draw the conclusion that there is no size limit to a tumor of that gland that can be observed rather than treated," Sturgis said.
Davies, an assistant professor of surgery in the Dartmouth Medical School section of otolaryngology and a staff surgeon at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt., was also the author of a 2006 report that started an ongoing controversy about the incidence of thyroid cancer in the United States. That paper reported a sharp increase in the number of thyroid cancers being diagnosed, and oncologists are still divided about whether the increase should be attributed to overdiagnosis or some unknown factor.
About 37,000 new cases of thyroid cancer are diagnosed each year in the United States, and about 1,600 people die from the disease each year, according to National Cancer Institute estimates.
In the new study, Davies and her colleagues used a national data base to compare 35,223 people diagnosed with thyroid cancer who had immediate radiation treatment or surgery with 440 who did not. The 20-year survival rates were determined by projecting the death rates in the two groups over periods of six to eight years.
Davies said the finding has led her to restrict treatment to people where there were signs of danger -- difficulty swallowing, changes of voice (the thyroid gland is in the neck), radiation exposure to the head and neck or a family history of the cancer.
"For those patients, the risk of surgery is outweighed by the benefits," Davies said.
However, Sturgis contends that the conclusion of the new study is flawed because the national data base provides incomplete information. "Sometimes patients may have had unconventional treatment that doesn't get coded," he said. "For example, removal of a nodule may get coded as a biopsy."
Overdiagnosis of thyroid cancer does appear to be a problem, Sturgis said, and many biopsies -- tissues samples -- are being done when they shouldn't be. Current guidelines say that nodules less than 1 centimeter in size should be followed by imaging rather than by biopsies, he said.
Age is one factor in deciding whether to treat or observe that is not mentioned in the new study, Sturgis said. "An elderly patient with a small nodule is different from a young patient with a small nodule," he said.
And though the difference in survival over 20 years is only 2 percent, "treatment is better than observation, although it is a small difference," Sturgis said.
Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, described the study as "thought-provoking," but said the conclusion that so many thyroid cancers can be left untreated is "risky."
"The numbers are simply too small, and there are so many unanswered questions to justify a physician saying to a patient, 'It won't hurt you if we just follow this cancer,' " Lichtenfeld said. "That would require a completely different kind of study."
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Most often the first symptom of thyroid cancer is a nodule in the thyroid region of the neck.[2] However, many adults have small nodules in their thyroids, but typically under 5% of these nodules are found to be malignant. Sometimes the first sign is an enlarged lymph node. Later symptoms that can be present are pain in the anterior region of the neck and changes in voice.
Thyroid cancer is usually found in a euthyroid patient, but symptoms of hyperthyroidism or hypothyroidism may be associated with a large or metastatic well-differentiated tumor.
Thyroid nodules are of particular concern when they are found in those under the age of 20. The presentation of benign nodules at this age is less likely, and thus the potential for malignancy is far greater.
Nintendo, American heart group join to tackle obesity
The American Heart Association has teamed up with Japanese entertainment giant Nintendo to harness its Wii consoles and encourage Americans to exercise more to counter a soaring obesity problem.
Nintendo, whose Wii consoles with motion-controlling sensors took markets by storm in 2006, is working with the AHA in order to cut the risks of heart disease among Americans, their websites said.
According to the AHA nearly 70 percent of Americans do not get enough regular physical activity. Obesity, a major health problem in the US, is a determinant of cardiovascular disease, the number one killer in the country.
The association said that the average American spends more than eight hours a day sitting and recommends all adults to get at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week and 60 minutes daily for children.
Nintendo will carry the AHA logo on its active-play video game products including the Wii, the Wii Fit Plus, and the Wii Sports Resort.
The US has seen a dramatic increase in obesity during the past 20 years with roughly one in three adults considered obese, according to government statistics.
Nintendo hopes to reignite the Wii's sales, which have declined since its launch, and is banking on software aimed at increased physical activity as competitors such as Sony prepare to launch their own motion-sensing equipment.
The Kyoto-based company said earlier this month that games such as "Wii Sports Resort" and "Wii Fit Plus" helped raise the console's total lifetime sales to 70.93 million units, a record in the firm's history.
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Nintendo was founded as a card company in late 1889, originally named "Nintendo Koppai". Based in Kyoto, Japan, the business produced and marketed a playing card game called Hanafuda. The handmade cards soon became popular, and Yamauchi hired assistants to mass produce cards to satisfy demand. Nintendo continues to manufacture playing cards in Japan[11] and organizes its own contract bridge tournament called the "Nintendo Cup".[12]
New ventures (1956–1975)
In 1956, Hiroshi Yamauchi (the grandson of Fusajiro Yamauchi) visited the U.S. to talk with the United States Playing Card Company, the dominant playing card manufacturer in that country. He found that the world's biggest company in his business was only using a small office. This was a turning point, where Yamauchi realized the limitations of the playing card business. He then gained access to Disney's characters and put them on the playing cards to drive sales.
In 1963, Yamauchi renamed Nintendo Playing Card Company Limited to Nintendo Company, Limited. The company then began to experiment in other areas of business using the newly injected capital. During this period of time between 1963 and 1968, Nintendo set up a taxi company, a "love hotel" chain, a TV network and a food company (trying to sell instant rice, similar to instant noodles). All these ventures eventually failed, and after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, playing card sales dropped, leaving Nintendo with 60 yen in stocks.
In 1966, Nintendo moved into the Japanese toy industry with the Ultra Hand, an extending arm developed by its maintenance engineer Gunpei Yokoi in his free time. Yokoi was moved from maintenance to the new "Nintendo Games" department as a product developer. Nintendo continued to produce popular toys, including the Ultra Machine, Love Tester and the Kousenjuu series of light gun games. Despite some successful products, Nintendo struggled to meet the fast development and manufacturing turnaround required of the toy market, and fell behind the well-established companies such as Bandai and Tomy.
In 1973, the focus shifted to family entertainment venues with the Laser Clay Shooting System, using the same light gun technology used in Nintendo's Kousenjuu series of toys, and set up in abandoned bowling alleys. Following some success, Nintendo developed several more light gun machines for the emerging arcade scene. While the Laser Clay Shooting System ranges had to be shut down following excessive costs, Nintendo had found a new market.
