Animals in the News

The past month has been kind of interesting as far as animals are concerned. First there was this Sarawakian zoo worker who was mauled to death by two Siberian tigers at the Singapore zoo.Then, a tapir got lost and ended up in a drain in Kuala Selangor (top right picture).The next was the hope of turtles returning to Trengganu(previous post).Before that it was the vulnerable sun bears, soon to be housed in a RM2.1 million sun bear conservation centre being built in Sandakan, Sabah, next to the orang utan sanctuary at Sepilok

Best of all, today's news relates to the wild jumbos.

The New Straits Times reported:

MARAUDING elephants took centre stage in the house of parliament yesterday as several members of parliament spoke of the damage they were causing to smallholdings.
The MPs wanted to know the steps taken by the Natural Resources and Environment Ministry to stop the wild jumbos.

Datuk Bung Mokhtar Radin (BN-Kinabatangan) complained that no effort had been made to check the perennial problem.

"I see there is no real effort by the federal and state governments to solve this.

"Countries like India and Thailand have successfully tamed their wild elephants. What about us?" he asked during the debate on the allocations for the ministry at the committee stage.

He suggested tongue-in-cheek that the wild elephants be relocated to the constituency of Fong Po Kuan (DAP-Batu Gajah) since it was named after the elephant.

Fong shot back good-naturedly, saying: "If the MP is wild, the elephants are also wild," alluding to Bung Mokhtar's often colourful antics.

She said wild elephants often invaded smallholdings and destroyed crops because humans had encroached into their habitat.

Talk about taming the wild animals, we can't even tame our Yang Berhormats, the parliamentarians!

World's First Trachea Transplant

The following news is indeed a breakthrough in medical science and deserves to be told and retold so that it gives hope to many who are in need of such medical interventions.I read the following article in the Daily Telegraph today:
(I have not edited it so as not to distort the message)
British doctors help perform world's first transplant of a whole organ grown in lab
British doctors have helped to perform the world's first transplant of a whole organ grown from stem cells, signalling a significant medical breakthrough.

Surgeons replaced the damaged windpipe of Claudia Castillo, a 30-year-old mother of two, with one created from stem cells grown in a laboratory at Bristol University.
Because the new windpipe was made from cells taken from Ms Castillo's own body, using a process called "tissue engineering", she has not needed powerful drugs to prevent her body rejecting the organ.
Avoiding the use of these drugs means she will not be an increased risk of cancer and other diseases unlike other transplant patients - another significant advance.
Five months after the operation was carried out she is now living normally and is able to look after her children again.
Stem cells are "master cells" which can be manipulated in a laboratory to become any other cell in the body.
Scientists hailed the procedure as a breakthrough and predicted surgeons could be regularly replacing hearts with laboratory-grown organs within 20 years.

The technique would "revolutionise" surgery, they claimed, and has the potential to save thousands of lives.
The team behind the operation hope to replicate the procedure to grow voiceboxes within five years and say that from there the door would be open to use the technology to create any organ including a bladder, kidney or even a heart.

Professor Martin Birchall, who grew the stem cells in his laboratory at the University of Bristol, said: "In 20 years time this will be the most common operation that surgeons are doing. This will completely revolutionise how we think about surgery and medicine."
Although doctors were able to carry out a similar operation on a bladder two years ago, Professor Birchall said that that had merely been a "patch", transferring part rather than the whole of the organ, a much less complex task.
"That was a major step forward," he said, "but this is another major step forward again."

Every year more than 1,000 patients in Britain die on transplant waiting lists, prompting scientists to consider other ways to produce organs. Ms Castillo's operation required a section of windpipe from an organ donor as a "scaffold" for the stem cells - meaning the technique will not immediately solve the shortage of donor organs. However, it is hoped that eventually artificial scaffolds can be made which would avoid the need for donor organs completely.

Without the operation, surgeons would have had to remove one of Ms Castillo's lungs, which would have reduced her life expectancy dramatically, said Paolo Macchiarini, who performed the surgery at the Hospital Clinic, Barcelona, in June.
"But now she can expect to have a normal life expectancy for a woman her age."
Ms Castillo, who is originally from Colombia but who now lives in Spain, is now able to look after her children, walk up two flights of stairs and even occasionally go dancing.

She said: "The possibility of avoiding the removal of my entire lung, and, instead, replacing only my diseased bronchus with this tissue engineering process, represented a unique chance for me to return to my normal life.
"I was scared at the beginning because I was the first patient but had confidence and trusted the doctors. I am now enjoying life and am very happy that my illness has been cured."

After suffering from tuberculosis, she was hospitalised in March of this year with acute shortness of breath which meant that she was unable to carry out simple domestic duties or care for her children.

With the only other option available an operation to remove her left lung, doctors decided to see if they could grow a new windpipe in the laboratory.
To create the new airway scientists originally started with a donor windpipe which they stripped of all its cells, using a new technique developed by Padua University, leaving just a form of "scaffold" which they then encouraged Claudia's cells to grow around.

After growing a 5 cm long trachea in the lab, the scientists then carried out the operation to transplant it into the patient.

Doctors have previously been unsuccessful in attempting to transplant a windpipe from one human to another, because the large amount of immune-system suppressing drugs needed to ensure that the body would not immediately reject the organ. Severe infections, bleeding and tissue death have led to other trachea transplants failing.
No such medication was needed in this case, because the airway had been grown using the patient's own stem cells, taken from her hip and nose.

Two months after the transplant, tests showed that her lung function had returned to normal, according to the findings published in the Lancet medical journal.
Around 300 patients a year suffer from similar problems as Claudia, caused by cancer, infection or tuberculosis.

Around 3,000 a year could benefit from a voicebox transplant while tens of thousands of lives worldwide could be saved if doctors were able to transplant hearts and other organs grown in the laboratory.

Professor Macchiarini, from the University of Barcelona, said: "We are terribly excited by these results. After one month, a biopsy elicited local bleeding, indicating that the blood vessels had already grown back successfully".
Anthony Hollander, also from the University of Bristol, said: "This successful treatment manifestly demonstrates the potential of adult stem cells to save lives".
Ben Sykes, from the UK National Stem Cell Network, said: "This is an excellent demonstration of the potential of adult stem cells as one of several possible avenues in regenerative medicine and shows that the funding which has been invested into, and continues to be invested into, bone marrow stem cell research over decades is worthwhile."

Surely for the entrepreneurs among us, this creates a host of opportunities. For the budding doctors, this could be one area you can proceed to after your graduation. For the patients among us, pray that you live long enough to grow your own cells to save your life.

Melamine Tainted Foods

Today's New Straits Times reported that:
Melamine-contaminated biscuits are still being sold openly by 24-hour convenience stores and sundry shops.The Health Minister is furious and warns retailers of stern action if they did not clear their shelves of 18 types of Khong Guan and Khian Guan biscuits at once.

"Shop owners or retailers who are found to be still selling these biscuits will be fined," Liow said.The ministry will seize and destroy all tainted products."

The source of the excessive melamine contamination was the baking agent, ammonium bicarbonate, imported from China, and not milk, as in previous cases.

Both Khong Guan and Khian Guan had been ordered to remove all 18 types of biscuits with immediate effect. The two companies were also advised to voluntarily recall other products pending checks by the ministry for melamine contamination.

To date, 22 food products containing melamine have been banned by the Health Ministry.

Apart from the Khong Guan and Khian Guan biscuits, the others banned are the White Rabbit Creamer Candy, Ego White Rabbit Creamy Candy and Taro brand biscuits.

Yesterday, the ministry also banned the Silang brand Potato Crackers for melamine contamination.

A random check of sundry shops and convenience stores in the city showed that some of the banned biscuits were still displayed prominently on the shelves. Workers there claimed ignorance of the ban.

Asked whether the onus was on the manufacturers or retailers to remove the tainted biscuits, Liow said "normally the retailers will voluntarily pull the products off the shelves and return them to the manufacturers".

A source from the Food Safety Quality division under the Health Ministry said manufacturers would be given a grace period of two weeks to remove all the banned products.

In another development, Food Safety Quality director Noraini Mohd Othman said in a statement that officials were gathering information from Japanese authorities on the frozen green beans which sickened three Japanese.

The Japan Times reported two days ago that all three experienced numbness in the mouth after consuming the beans processed by Chinese company Yantai Beihai Foodstuff Co in Shandong province.

On local news report that Chinese green beans were contaminated with the pesticide dichlorvos residue by more than a thousand times permitted by the authorities, Noraini said only locally produced mangoes with a maximum residue limit of 0.1ppm was allowed under the Food Regulations Act 1985.

As for imported food, the pesticide residue is only allowed in certain meat (beef, chicken and duck), milk, mushrooms, wheat flour, wheat germ and wholemeal wheat, with the maximum residue level allowed at between 0.02 and 10ppm.

Dichlorvos is an insecticide used to control insects, especially during storage of agricultural produce. People exposed to it may suffer nausea and vomiting, restlessness, sweating and muscle tremors. Very large doses may cause coma, suffocation and death.

So, be careful what you put in your mouths,as the Malay saying goes:Sebab mulut badan merana literally meaning because of the mouth, the body suffers.

Return of Turtles to Terengganu?

Quoting a report from Malaysiakini:

Mosques to give turtle conservation sermon
Nov 17, 08 5:36pm

Mosques in Terengganu, which was once a major turtle breeding ground, will give an unusual sermon on protecting the endangered animals this Friday, conservationists said.

Imams, or religious leaders, will stress the importance of protecting the environment and warn against egg poaching, pollution of the seas and uncontrolled fishing.

"If this attitude continues, imagine then what would be left for the future generation? Maybe one day our grandchildren will no longer know about turtles," the sermon reads according to a copy obtained by AFP.

Rahayu Zulkifli from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which runs a turtle conservation project in Terengganu, said the idea of preaching about conservation was a joint initiative with local imams.

"In a Malay Muslim-dominated society like this, they look up to what the imams say and this is a way to get the message down to the local communities, where turtle eggs are still consumed freely," she told AFP.

Terengganu was once famed for its population of leatherback turtles, which in the 1950s used to struggle up the beaches in their thousands to lay eggs in the sand.

A surprise return

Their numbers dwindled to the point that in 2007 none appeared, raising fears they had been completely wiped out.

This year they made a surprise return and there were eight nestings, but none of the eggs were fertilised because of a lack of males in the area, said Munir Mohamad Nawi, state fisheries department director.

"Nevertheless it has improved a lot this year and it shows positive results for our conservation efforts so we must press on," he told AFP.

"The sermon will help raise awareness among Muslims in this state on their responsibility to conserve nature, particularly the leatherback turtles, because it is part of our heritage."

Terengganu's beaches are also landing sites for green turtles - the second largest species after the leatherbacks - the Olive Ridley turtle and the hawksbill, although sightings of the latter two are increasingly rare.

-AFP

I hope it works and the people will stop consuming the turtles' eggs.