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Cambodia’s Tonle Sap Lake, which lies in the center of the country, is home to hundreds of species of fish that provide the Southeast Asian nation with up to 60 percent of its protein. But the lake’s rich fishery is at risk because of overfishing, pollution and hydroelectric dams. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The European Union’s top court Monday ordered Poland to stop logging in the ancient Bialowieza Forest, or pay an $118,000 daily fine.

“Poland must immediately cease its active forest management operations in the Bialowieza Forest, except in exceptional cases where they are strictly necessary to ensure public safety,” the European Court of Justice wrote.

The forest is home to rare plants, birds and mammals and is one of Europe’s last remaining primeval habitats. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The court first warned Poland against logging in July.

Poland says the trees are weak and damaged by a beetle outbreak. It says cutting them down is necessary to prevent people foraging for mushrooms from getting hurt if the trees fall.

The logging argument is another in a series of a war of words between the European Union and the right-wing Polish government, which accuses the EU of infringing on its sovereignty.

The EU has said it is worried about the decline of democratic values in Poland.
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A small fly that thrives at an inhospitable California lake east of Yosemite National Park long has perplexed observers who watch as it crawls into the severely salty and alkaline water, snacks on some algae or lays some eggs, then emerges dry as a desert.

Research published on Monday finally explains the secrets of this scuba-diving insect.

These quarter-inch-long (6-mm) alkali flies possess specialized traits that let them conquer Mono Lake, scientists found. They are covered in a large quantity of fine hairs coated with special waxes that let them encapsulate themselves in a body-hugging bubble that protects them from water that would doom an ordinary insect.

“The flies have found a great gig — all the food they want with few predators. They just had to solve this one tricky problem,” said California Institute of Technology biologist Michael Dickinson, co-author of the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

All insects are hairy and water repellant to some degree.

 

These alkali flies, whose scientific name is Ephydra hians, have magnified both traits to overcome the extreme conditions of Mono Lake, considered among the “wettest” water on Earth with a slippery, nearly oily feel. The water tends to attach to any surface due to exorbitant amounts of sodium carbonate, a chemical used in laundry detergent.

“The study provides a clear example of evolution in action,” added co-author Floris van Breugel, a former Caltech postdoctoral scholar now at the University of Washington.

“The flies have evolved to crawl under water so they can feed on the abundant food, alga, that grows there. The lake has no fish because the fish cannot live in the harsh chemicals of the lake. Thus, the flies have no major predators in the lake. Fish are why most insects would be crazy to crawl under water.”

American author Mark Twain was among those who remarked about these flies at the 12-mile-wide (19-km) Mono Lake, which is three times saltier than the Pacific Ocean. They also live at Oregon’s Lake Abert and Utah’s Great Salt Lake, also salty and alkaline.

The flies use sharp foot claws to crawl into the water from rocky outcroppings. Their hairy bodies trap a layer of air that envelops them in a protective bubble, except for the eyes to permit good underwater vision. After eating or laying eggs, they let go and float to the surface, where the bubble pops, leaving them safe and dry.
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Businessman Kyle Graves shot himself in the ankle so emergency room doctors would feed his opioid habit.

Ex-trucker Jeff McCoy threatened to blow his brains out if his mother didn’t hand over his fentanyl patches.

 

Bianca Knight resorted to street pills when her opioids ran out, envisioning her law career dreams crumble.

 

These are three Americans who started using powerful painkillers legitimately but, like millions of others, got caught in the country’s worst drug epidemic.

Now they’re fighting the same recovery battle, on anti-addiction medicine similar to pills that nearly did them in. Their doctor, Dan Lonergan, a Vanderbilt University pain and addiction physician, sometimes recommends the same drugs to pain patients that brought his addiction patients to the brink.

 

He’s heard criticism about doctors “who get ’em hooked on drugs and then turn around and treat ’em for addiction.” And he’s seen the finger-pointing from those who think faith and willpower are the only answer.

“Doctors have contributed to this problem. In the past three decades we have gotten a lot of patients on medications that can be very dangerous,” he said. “The pharmaceutical industry has contributed significantly to this problem. This is a problem that we all need to own.”

 

This is a snapshot from Nashville of America’s addiction crisis. More than 2 million people are hooked on opioids. Overdoses kill, on average, 120 Americans every day. Even for survivors, success can be precarious.

An unsure future

At 53 and on disability, Kyle Graves still feels stabbing pains that a daily handful of pills used to ease.

His troubles began more than a decade ago when he sought relief for excruciating arthritis. He was prescribed oxycodone, opioid pills that can help short-term pain but can become addictive when used long-term.

 

When he lost his finance manager job, they helped with that pain, too. When his sixth child, a baby boy, died from spinal meningitis, Graves sunk deep into addiction.

He’d use up a month’s supply in days, followed by terrible withdrawals — vomiting, shaking uncontrollably, intense pain.  

 

After a doctor refused more refills, Graves grabbed a pistol from his nightstand, pulled the trigger, then called an ambulance.

 

At the hospital, two shots of morphine for the ankle wound “did the trick.”

 

Graves thinks only his wife suspected the ruse; she left with the kids.

 

“It just devastated and ruined my life,” he said.

Graves went to rehab, treated with hard work and prayer. It worked for a time, but after relapsing Graves sought help three years ago from Lonergan, who prescribed recovery medicine containing buprenorphine, an opioid that reduces cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

 

He hasn’t relapsed for two years, but tries not to dwell on the future.

 

“Anything could happen,” Graves said.  

Problem for a lifetime

 

 Jeff McCoy has been a drummer, a Harley rider and long-haul trucker. These days he prefers baking cookies and doting on his wife, Joanne. Recovery from opioid painkillers prompted the turnaround.

 

It started nearly 17 years ago, after surgery for a back injury — maybe from too much time on the road, he’s not really sure, but it forced him to quit trucking. His doctor prescribed Vicodin — painkillers that contain the opioid hydrocodone. Soon he was hooked.

 

“I just went full bore,” McCoy says. “I was popping pills like crazy.”

 

When those stopped working, he was prescribed powerful fentanyl skin patches that deliver medicine gradually. McCoy found that chewing them worked faster.

 

McCoy needed ever more to avoid withdrawals.

 

His wife would lock the patches in a safe, but when he found the key, his mother stored them at her house nearby.

“Got to the point where I got on the phone with mom, ‘You better bring me that patch right now else I’m splattering my brains all over this living room.’”

When his wife threatened to leave, he checked in to a detox center, in 2009, enduring two hellish weeks of withdrawal.

 

Now he calls his wife his addiction and figures he’ll be on anti-craving medicine for life.

“I finally wanted to stop,” McCoy said. “If I can survive with no life, come on, it’s worth it, but you gotta want to.”

Do I have problem?

 

After law school graduation, Bianca Knight had a nagging question: “How do I know if I have a problem?”

 

After injuring her back carrying law books, Knight had spent the past two years medicated, on hydrocodone pills from a different doctor.

They eased the pain, but “also gave me a euphoric feeling and helped me get through my long day in law school,” she said.

 

Knight is nearly blind from a rare optic nerve condition. A state program paid for a reader to help with school work.

A doctor warned vaguely about addiction risks but Knight thought she’d be immune. Soon she was taking far more than the prescribed amount.

 

“Toward the end, I resorted to buying off the street,” Knight said. That’s when she sought out Lonergan.

He explained that the average person doesn’t think about opioid pain pills 24/7.

 

Knight started buprenorphine treatment. Church and support group meetings also help, she says. Her baby girl, born this past summer, is extra incentive for her to stay clean.

 

Still, Knight said, “For anyone in recovery, it is a daily struggle and I’d be a fool not to think so.”

 

             
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Cancer doctors struggling to work out the best way to use modern immunotherapy drugs now have further evidence of the benefits of adding them to chemotherapy, despite earlier skepticism.

News that Roche’s immune system-boosting drug Tecentriq delayed lung cancer progression when given alongside chemo and its older drug Avastin validates the approach for the first time in a large Phase III clinical trial.

It is a significant milestone for physicians, patients and investors, who are trying to assess the competitive landscape as drugmakers race to develop better ways to fight tumors in previously untreated lung cancer.

Lung cancer is by far the biggest oncology market and first-line treatment provides access to the most patients, opening up potential annual sales forecast by some analysts at $20 billion.

Roche and Merck & Co have led the way in pioneering so-called “chemo-combo” treatment, while AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers are betting primarily on mixing two immunotherapies. AstraZeneca notably failed to show a similar

benefit in a high-profile clinical trial in July.

Stefan Zimmermann, an oncologist at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland, said the Roche data would help scotch concerns that chemo might hamper the new class of immuno-oncology medicines.

“Many experts in the field will be relieved because there has been uncertainty … I think this will really encourage many of us to use this combination upfront,” he told Reuters. “For now, the only positive data that we have is for chemo combination.”

Merck, in fact, already has U.S. approval to add chemo to its immunotherapy drug Keytruda – but this was based on a small trial and the company withdrew a similar European application last month, knocking confidence in its strategy.

Since Keytruda, Bristol’s Opdivo, Roche’s Tecentriq and AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi are all rival inhibitors of biological switches known as PD-1 or PD-L1, the market is “largely a zero-sum game,” according to Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson.

“Roche’s good fortune means there is less to go around for other companies,” he said.

In the case of Merck, the U.S. drugmaker now faces a rival with a different and perhaps superior drug combination. Roche believes adding Avastin in addition to chemo can further help restore anti-cancer immunity.

For AstraZeneca and Bristol, the bar has just been raised for two other key clinical trials sponsored by the drugmakers that are expected to report results in 2018.

Roche itself will present full results on the ability of its new combination to delay the worsening of lung cancer at a European Society for Medical Oncology meeting in Geneva on December 7. Data on whether it also helps patients live longer is expected in the first half of next year.

Overall survival is the gold standard in cancer care but proving a treatment extends the time before disease progresses is an important marker on the way.

“If there is positive progression-free survival then I think it is very, very likely this will also translate into an overall survival benefit over time,” said Zimmermann.

Reporting by Ben Hirschler; Editing by Mark Potter.
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Preparing for a century of steadily higher tides is a central challenge for city officials from Boston to Bangkok. The U.S. city of Miami, Florida, and its neighbors are home to nearly 3 million people and billions of dollars of real estate development. VOA’s Steve Baragona has a look at what rising seas mean for one of the most vulnerable cities in the United States.
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Parasitic worms found in a North Korean soldier, critically injured during a desperate defection, highlight nutrition and hygiene problems that experts say have plagued the isolated country for decades.

At a briefing Wednesday, lead surgeon Lee Cook-jong displayed photos showing dozens of flesh-colored parasites, including one 27 cm (10.6 in) long, removed from the wounded soldier’s digestive tract during a series of surgeries to save his life.

“In my over 20 year-long career as a surgeon, I have only seen something like this in a textbook,” Lee said.

The parasites, along with kernels of corn in his stomach, may confirm what many experts and previous defectors have described about the food and hygiene situation for many North Koreans.

“Although we do not have solid figures showing health conditions of North Korea, medical experts assume that parasite infection problems and serious health issues have been prevalent in the country,” said Choi Min-Ho, a professor at Seoul National University College of Medicine who specializes in parasites.

The soldier’s condition was “not surprising at all considering the North’s hygiene and parasite problems,” he said.

​Hail of bullets

The soldier was flown by helicopter to hospital Monday after his dramatic escape to South Korea in a hail of bullets fired by North Korean soldiers.

He is believed to be an army staff sergeant in his mid-20s who was stationed in the Joint Security Area in the United Nations truce village of Panmunjom, according to Kim Byung-kee, a lawmaker of South Korea’s ruling party, briefed by the National Intelligence Service.

North Korea has not commented on the defection.

While the contents of the soldier’s stomach don’t necessarily reflect the population as a whole, his status as a soldier with an elite assignment would indicate he would at least be as well nourished as an average North Korean.

He was shot in his buttocks, armpit, back shoulder and knee among other wounds, according to the hospital where the soldier is being treated.

‘The best fertilizer’

Parasitic worms were also once common in South Korea 40 to 50 years ago, Lee noted during his briefing, but have all but disappeared as economic conditions greatly improved.

Other doctors have also described removing various types of worms and parasites from North Korean defectors.

Their continued prevalence north of the heavily fortified border that divides the two Koreas could be in part tied to the use of human excrement, often called “night soil.”

“Chemical fertilizer was supplied by the state until the 1970s, but from the early 1980s, production started to decrease,” said Lee Min-bok, a North Korean agriculture expert who defected to South Korea in 1995. “By the 1990s, the state could not supply it anymore, so farmers started to use a lot of night soil instead.”

In 2014, supreme leader Kim Jong Un personally urged farmers to use human waste, along with animal waste and organic compost, to fertilize their fields. A lack of livestock, however, made it difficult to find animal waste, said Lee, the agriculture expert.

Even harder to overcome, he said, is the view of night soil as the “best fertilizer in North Korea,” despite the risk of worms and parasites.

“Vegetables grown in it are considered more delicious than others,” Lee said.

​Limited diets

The medical briefing described the wounded soldier as being 170 cm (5 feet 5 inches) and 60 kg (132 pounds) with his stomach containing corn. It’s a staple grain that more North Koreans may be relying on in the wake of what the United Nations has called the worst drought since 2001.

Imported corn, which is less preferred but cheaper to obtain than rice, has tended to increase in years when North Koreans are more worried about their seasonal harvests.

Between January and September this year, China exported nearly 49,000 tons of corn to North Korea, compared with 3,125 tons in all of 2016, according to data released by Beijing.

Despite the drought and international sanctions over Pyongyang’s nuclear program, the cost of corn and rice has remained relatively stable, according to a Reuters analysis of market data collected by the defector-run Daily NK website.

Since the 1990s, when government rations failed to prevent a famine, North Koreans have gradually turned to markets and other private means to feed themselves.

The World Food Program says a quarter of North Korean children 6-59 months old, who attend nurseries that the organization assists, suffer from chronic malnutrition.

On average North Koreans are less nourished than their southern neighbors. The WFP says around 1 in 4 children have grown less tall than their South Korean counterparts. A study from 2009 said pre-school children in the North were up to 13 cm (5 inches) shorter and up to 7 kg (15 pounds) lighter than those brought up in the South.

“The main issue in DPRK is a monotonous diet — mainly rice/maize, kimchi and bean paste — lacking in essential fats and protein,” the WFP told Reuters in a statement last month.

 
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Another wearable health monitor is poised to enter the market. As Faith Lapidus reports, this one is on permanent watch for any signs of illness.
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Fotis Kafatos, a Greek molecular biologist who had a distinguished academic career in both the United States and Europe and became the founding president of the European Research Council, has died. He was 77.

His family announced his death in Heraklion, Crete, on Saturday “after a long illness.”

Born in Crete in 1940, Kafatos was known for his research on malaria and for sequencing the genome of the mosquito that transmits the disease.

He was a professor at Harvard University from 1969 to 1994, where he also served as chairman of the Cellular and Developmental Biology Department, and at Imperial College in London since 2005. He had been an adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health since 2007.

Kafatos was also a part-time professor at the University of Crete in his hometown since 1982. He also was the third director of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, a life sciences research organization funded by multiple countries, from 1993 to 2005.

Kafatos considered the 2007 founding of the European Research Council under the auspices of the European Commission as his crowning achievement. The council funds and promotes projects driven by researchers. He stepped down as president in 2010.

He came to be disillusioned by the heavily bureaucratic rules that, in his mind, hampered research.

“We continuously had to spend energy, time and effort on busting bureaucracy roadblocks that kept appearing in our way,” Kafatos told scientific journal Nature soon after he left the post. But, he added, “We delivered to Europe what we promised.”
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The so-called ‘godfather of coral’ is part of a new research mission to unlock some of the secrets of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  Dr. Charlie Veron is part of a scientific team searching for the “super corals” that managed to survive consecutive years of bleaching on the world’s largest reef system.

 

Charlie Veron is one of the world’s leading experts on coral reefs.  Born in Sydney, he is known as the ‘godfather of coral’ because he has discovered so many different species.  He is part of the Great Barrier Reef Legacy mission, which is taking eight teams of scientists on a voyage to map and test the health of remote parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.  

They are searching for so-called ‘super corals’ that managed to survive the past two years of devastating coral bleaching events.

Veron says the reef is in sharp decline.

“It is gut-wrenching and I have lived with this now for close on 20 years,” he said. “The predictions that scientists made well over a decade ago have all turned out to be spot on.  Well, this is a very important trip because we are actually seeing for ourselves what corals are vulnerable to mass bleaching and what corals are surviving mass bleaching.  So, once we know that we will be able to make smart decisions about coral, so the trip is really quite pivotal.”

In April, researchers discovered that for the first time mass bleaching had affected the Great Barrier Reef in consecutive years, damaging two-thirds of the World Heritage-listed area.  

When it bleaches, the coral is not dead, but it begins to starve and can eventually die.  The reefs, though, are resilient, but what concerns scientists is that more frequent bleaching, which is caused by rising water temperatures, makes it harder for the coral to recover. Bleaching occurs when corals under stress drive out the algae that give them color.  

Scientists believe that the main threat to the reef that stretches 2,300 kilometers down the Queensland coast in northern Australia is climate change.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is about the size of Italy or Japan and is so big it can be seen from outer space.  It is home to more than 3,000 types of mollusks and 30 species of whales and dolphins.

 

 
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