ASIA / PACIFIC
Page 4 n THE ASIAN REPORTER
October 19, 2015
Three share Nobel medicine prize for tropical disease
ACCOMPLISHED OCTOGENARIANS. This photo taken in the
1980s and released by Xinhua News Agency shows Tu Youyou, a pharma-
cologist with the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in Beijing,
working on artemisinin, a drug therapy for malaria. Three scientists from
Ireland, Japan, and China were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in medi-
cine for discovering drugs against malaria and other parasitic diseases
that affect hundreds of millions of people every year. Tu was awarded
the prize for discovering artemisinin, a drug that has helped significantly
reduce the mortality rates of malaria patients. (Yang Wumin/Xinhua via
AP)
Continued from page 3
The Carter Center called the three laureates “heroes in
the truest sense of the word, saving lives through
medicine.”
Campbell, 85, is a research fellow emeritus at Drew
University in Madison, New Jersey. He told The AP he
made his main discovery in 1975 while working at
pharmaceutical company Merck.
“It was a great team effort,” said Campbell, who now
lives in North Andover, Massachusetts. He said the award
came as a “huge surprise.”
Omura, 80, is a professor emeritus at Kitasato
University in Japan and is from the central prefecture of
Yamanashi. He wondered whether he deserved the prize.
“I have learned so much from microorganisms and I
have depended on them, so I would much rather give the
prize to microorganisms,” Omura told Japanese broad-
caster NHK.
Working in the 1970s, Omura isolated new strains of
Streptomyces bacteria and cultured them so that they
could be analyzed for their impact against harmful
microorganisms, the Nobel committee said.
Omura said the crucial strain was found in a soil sample
from a golf course near Tokyo. He said he always carries
around a plastic bag in his wallet so he can collect soil
samples.
Campbell showed that one of those cultures was
remarkably efficient against parasites in animals, the
committee said. The bioactive agent was purified, named
avermectin, and modified to a compound that effectively
killed parasitic larvae, leading to the creation of a new
class of drugs.
Today, its derivative ivermectin is considered a highly
effective preventive treatment against river blindness
and lymphatic filariasis, the committee said.
“(Ivermectin) reduces the number of parasites in the
blood so that when a mosquito bites someone, it cannot
transmit the disease to someone else,” said Dr. Peter
Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at
Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He said mass
distribution campaigns have given out ivermectin for free
to 450 million people in efforts to eliminate both river
Glass walkway over
China canyon cracks
with tourists on it
BEIJING (AP) — A glass walkway that
hugs a cliff above a scenic canyon in central
China has been closed after cracks
developed while dozens of tourists were
walking on the newly built structure.
Only one of the three layers of glass that
make up the walkway was damaged, so
there was no safety threat, the management
bureau of the Yuntaishan scenic area in
Hunan province said on its microblog.
The walkway was supporting dozens of
tourists when the cracks appeared with a
loud bang. A single pane of the 223-foot
section shattered into coin-sized segments,
according to footage on state broadcaster
CCTV.
Postings to China’s Weibo messaging
service described the fears of tourists who
heard the panel crack, but there were no
indications of mass panic or injuries.
The structure hugs a cliff side roughly 394
feet above a canyon in the remote mountain
area renowned for its scenery. It opened
September 20 and the problem occurred at
the height of China’s weeklong October 1
National Day holiday.
The post on the management bureau’s
microblog said the cracks formed due to
external force, but wasn’t specific. It added
that the walkway can support weights of
more than 175 pounds per square foot.
A glass walkway above London’s Tower
Bridge had a similar problem in November
when a falling bottle shattered the top layer
of one pane, which was designed to be easily
replaceable if damaged.
Such walkways have grown popular in
China as scenic areas compete to attract
increasingly affluent Chinese tourists. The
world’s highest and longest glass skywalk is
located in Hunan province’s Zhangjiajie,
known as the model for the planet Pandora
in the film Avatar. The structure stretches
1,410 feet at a height of 984 feet above the
canyon floor.
blindness and lymphatic filariasis.
Hotez said that in parts of Africa, adult sufferers of river
blindness are often led around with a stick by a young
child. Until ivermectin came along, Hotez said there was
no way to effectively prevent the disease.
Tu, 84, is a researcher at the China Academy of Chinese
Medical Sciences.
As a junior researcher, she was recruited by Chairman
Mao’s government to work on a military project in 1969 to
find malaria drugs.
She turned to herbal medicine to discover a new
malarial agent in an extract from the sweet wormwood
plant. The agent, artemisinin (pronounced ar-tuh-MIHS’-
ihn-ihn), was highly effective against malaria, a disease
that was on the rise in the 1960s, the committee said.
Malaria is a mosquito-borne disease that still kills
around 500,000 people a year, mostly in Africa, despite
efforts to control it.
Colin Sutherland, a reader in parasitology at London
School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that the
impact of artemisinin has been profound and changed
nearly every country’s malaria treatment protocol.
Still, artemisinin resistance has already been
confirmed in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and
Vietnam.
There have been several previous Nobel Prizes for
malaria research, including the 1902 award to British
army surgeon Ronald Ross, who discovered that the
disease is transmitted by mosquitoes.
The last time a Chinese citizen won a Nobel was in 2012,
when Mo Yan received the literature award. But China
has been yearning for a Nobel Prize in science. This was
the first Nobel Prize given to a Chinese scientist for work
carried out within China.
“This is indeed a glorious moment,” said Li Chenjian, a
vice provost at prestigious Peking University. “This also is
an acknowledgement to the traditional Chinese medicine,
for the work began with herbal medicine.”
Stephen Ward, deputy director of the Liverpool School
of Tropical Medicine, said the prize confirms that Chinese
scientists “did fantastic work in the 1960s even when they
were effectively ignored by the rest of the world.”
Besides the cash prize, each winner also receives a
diploma and a gold medal at the annual award ceremony
on December 10, the anniversary of the death of prize
founder Alfred Nobel.
Cheng reported from London. Associated Press writers Malin
Rising in Stockholm, Malcolm Ritter in New York, Didi Tang
in Beijing, Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo, and Geoff Mulvihill in
Haddonfield, New Jersey, contributed to this report.
Researcher says children’s cancer linked to Fukushima radiation
By Yuri Kageyama
The Associated Press
OKYO — A new study says
children living near the Fuku-
shima nuclear meltdowns have
been diagnosed with thyroid cancer at a
rate 20 to 50 times that of children
elsewhere, a difference the authors
contend undermines the government’s
position that more cases have been
discovered in the area only because of
stringent monitoring.
Most of the 370,000 children in Fuku-
shima prefecture (state) have been given
ultrasound checkups since the March
2011 meltdowns at the tsunami-ravaged
Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant. The
most recent statistics, released in August,
show that thyroid cancer is suspected or
confirmed in 137 of those children, a
number that rose by 25 from a year
earlier. Elsewhere, the disease occurs in
only about one or two of every million
children per year by some estimates.
“This is more than expected and
emerging faster than expected,” lead
author Toshihide Tsuda told The
Associated Press during a visit to Tokyo.
“This is 20 times to 50 times what would
be normally expected.”
The study was released online and is
being published in the November issue of
Epidemiology, produced by the Herndon,
Virginia-based International Society for
Environmental Epidemiology. The data
comes from tests overseen by Fukushima
Medical University.
Making sense of the relationship
between radiation and cancer is
precarious: It’s scientifically impossible to
link an individual cancer case to
radiation. Looking harder with routine
checkups, like the one in Fukushima,
leads to quicker discovery of tumors,
inflating the tallies in a so-called
“screening effect.”
Right after the disaster, the lead doctor
T
brought in to Fukushima, Shunichi
Yamashita, repeatedly ruled out the
possibility of radiation-induced illnesses.
The thyroid checks were being ordered
just to play it safe, according to the
government.
But Tsuda, a professor at Okayama
University, said the latest results from
the ultrasound checkups, which continue
to be conducted, raise doubts about the
government’s view.
Thyroid cancer among children is one
sickness the medical world has
definitively linked to radiation after the
1986 Chernobyl catastrophe. If treated, it
is rarely fatal, and early detection is a
plus, but patients are on medication for
the rest of their lives.
Scientists are divided on Tsuda’s
conclusions.
In the same Epidemiology issue, Scott
Davis, professor at the Department of
Epidemiology in the Seattle-based School
of Public Health, said the key limitation of
Tsuda’s study is the lack of individual-
level data to estimate actual radiation
doses.
Davis agreed with the findings of the
World
Health
Organization
and
UNSCEAR, or the United Nations
Scientific Committee on the Effects of
Atomic Radiation, both of which have
carried out reviews on Fukushima and
predicted cancer rates will remain stable,
with no rises being discernable as
radiation-caused.
David J. Brenner, professor of radiation
biophysics at Columbia University
Medical Center, took a different view.
While he agreed individual estimates on
radiation doses are needed, he said in a
telephone interview that the higher
thyroid cancer rate in Fukushima is “not
due to screening. It’s real.”
Conclusions about any connection
between Fukushima radiation and cancer
will help determine compensation and
other policies. Many people who live in
areas deemed safe by the government
have fled fearing sickness, especially for
their children.
An area extending about 12 miles from
the nuclear plant has been declared an
exclusion zone. The borders are
constantly being remapped as cleanup of
radiated debris and soil continues in an
effort to bring as many people back as
possible. Decommissioning the plant is
expected to take decades.
Noriko Matsumoto, 53, who used to
work as a nurse in Koriyama, Fukushima,
outside the no-go zone, fled to Tokyo with
her then-11-year-old daughter a few
months after the disaster. She had
initially shrugged off the fears but got
worried when her daughter started
getting nosebleeds and rashes.
“My daughter has the right to live free of
radiation,” she said. “We can never be sure
about blaming radiation. But I personally
feel radiation is behind sicknesses.”
Andrew F. Olshan, a professor at the
Department of Epidemiology at the
University of North Carolina, in Chapel
Hill, noted that research on what follows a
catastrophe is complex and difficult.
“Dr. Tsuda’s study had limitations,
including assessment of individual
radiation dose levels to the thyroid and
the ability to fully assess the impact of
screening on the excess cases detected,” he
said.
“Nonetheless, this study is critical to
initiate additional investigations of possi-
ble health effects, for governmental plan-
ning, and increasing public awareness.”
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