Tag Archives: China

by | February 19, 2011

Knife Removed From Man’s Head After Four Years

knife in head skull four yearsI don’t believe this story at all. There is no way a foreign object could stay in the human body for four years without being rejected by the body and getting infected.

I once got a splinter about the size of a third of a toothpick stuck in my thumb. The thing was so deep that even when I cut deeply into my thumb with an Exacto Knife, I couldn’t get it out.

After about a week, this thing became incredibly infected and began to fester. I took a day off work and went to the doctor in excruciating pain. The doctor of course laughed and asked why I had waited so long to come see her.

I told her I figured it would “work its way out.” She told me that it would. She put on a pair of gloves and squeezed my thumb. It hurt like hell.

The stuff that came out of my thumb smelled like a rotting human and looked like rotten cottage cheese. In the middle of it was the splinter.

Again, it took all of one week for this infection to occur. There is no way that this guy had a knife in his head for four years. JD

BEIJING – Surgeons in southern China successfully removed a rusty, 4-inch (10-centimeter) knife from the skull of a man who said it had been stuck in there for four years, the hospital said Friday.

Li Fuyan, 30, had been suffering from severe headaches, bad breath and breathing difficulties but never knew the cause of his discomfort, said the senior official at the Yuxi City People’s Hospital in Yunnan Province.

Li told doctors he had been stabbed in the lower right jaw by a robber four years ago and the blade broke off inside his head without anyone realizing it, said the director of the hospital’s Communist Party committee’s office who would only give his surname, He.

Surgeons worked cautiously to remove the badly-corroded blade without shattering it, He said. The hospital’s website also reported the successful surgery.

The case, which one of the doctors described as a “miracle,” has been widely covered by the Chinese media and discussed on the Internet.

“We checked his mouth, but no wound or scar has been found. It is very strange as to how the blade got into his head,” Xu Wen, deputy director of the hospital’s stomatology department, told state broadcaster CCTV.

CCTV showed footage of the rusted knife and interviewed Li, who said: “As time passed, I used injections to kill the pain in my head and ears. It has been four years already.”

Dr. Eugene Flamm, chairman of neurosurgery at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center, said X-ray images of the man’s head posted on the hospital’s website show the knife sitting behind the man’s throat, having missed the carotid artery and other key structures.

“There are planes and spaces between important organs. That’s how one does surgery — you dissect in those planes, move the trachea one way, the esophagus the other,” he said.

“Maybe out of sheer luck this knife passed through” one such area, Flamm said, adding that he was still surprised at the time the blade supposedly spent in the man’s body.

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by | May 13, 2010

Chinese eating dogs in space

Yang Liwei, the 44-year-old military pilot who commanded the Shenzhou Five mission in 2003, revealed the menu on-board the spacecraft in his autobiography, The Nine Levels between Heaven and Earth.

“Many of my friends are curious about what we eat [in space] and think that the astronauts must have some expensive delicacies, like shark’s fin or abalone,” he wrote. “Actually we ate quite normal food, there is no need to keep it a secret,” he added.

He listed a menu including braised chicken, steamed fish and dog meat from Huajiang county in Guangdong, which is famed for its nutritional benefits in China.

A local proverb in the south of China is that “Huajiang dog is better for you than ginseng”, referring to the medicinal root that plays a vital role in traditional Chinese medicine.

He added that the diet had been specially drawn up for the astronauts by Chinese nutritionists and that the food had been purchased from special suppliers in Beijing. Dog is widely eaten in northern China, where it is believed to help battle the winter cold. The menu was still in use last year, when Chinese astronauts conducted their first ever spacewalk. China has plans to land a man on the moon by 2020.

The revelation drew an angry rebuke from animal rights campaigners, who said Mr Yang was setting a bad example to his millions of fans.

“Yang Liwei is a role model for so many young people and he is one of China’s greatest heroes,” said Jill Robinson, the founder of Animals Asia. “We hope that he might recognise dogs as the heroes they are too: they found survivors after the Sichuan earthquake and protected people from potential terrorists during the Olympic games. Surely they deserve more.”

American astronauts also eat a varied menu of food, including beef enchiladas, lasagne, and sweet-and-sour pork on their space missions.

NASA has said space food must be easy to prepare and eat, and usually has lower fat, fewer calories and less salt.

Mr Yang also revealed that the pressure from take-off during the Shenzhou Five mission was so great that he thought he would die. “All of my internal organs seemed to have been crushed. I could hardly bear it and thought this could be the end for me,” he wrote.

On his re-entry to earth, he also noticed a crack in the window of the module. “It would be a lie to say I was not terrified. It was 1,600C to 1,800C in temperature outside”. Later, he discovered the crack had been a line in the heat-resistant coating.

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by | May 11, 2010

7 killed in China kindergarten attack

At least six children and a teacher were hacked to death and 20 injured Wednesday in yet another kindergarten attack in China, this time in the northwestern province of Shaanxi, state-run media reported.

The latest in a series of such attacks took place about 8 a.m. in Nanzheng, a county of Hanzhong city in southwestern Shaanxi, Xinhua News Agency said, citing local officials.

An earlier report had said seven children were killed, but Xinhua clarified that by saying one of the seven dead was a teacher.

The news agency said the attacker killed himself after the attacks.

The motive for the attacks was not immediately known.

China has seen a spate of violent rampages in recent months, with the latest being the fifth attack inside kindergartens and primary schools since March that have killed or injured dozens of children.

Three of these attacks took place within a span of three days in April, raising concerns that media publicity could be leading to “copycat” attacks.

In their wake, security in schools across the country has been stepped up with many institutions installing security cameras on their premises and hiring additional security guards.

The attacks have drawn the attention of senior Chinese officials, who said ensuring school security is a “major political task.”

The Ministry of Public Security earlier this month issued an emergency circular ordering all necessary measures to be taken against school attackers.

Recent days have also seen a spate of violent attacks carried out on women and children.

Last Saturday, a 36-year-old man stabbed eight people to death in southeastern China’s Jiangxi Province, including his mother, wife, 10- year-old daughter and four neighbors, state media reported.

On Monday, a 35-year-old man in Shaanxi reportedly killed two women and injured seven other people, including an 18-month-old toddler, in a stabbing rampage.

On Tuesday, a 37-year-old man was killed by crowds after he hacked to death with a knife a three-year-old girl and two women in the southern coastal region of Guangxi.

The state of attacks have led to national soul-searching over the root causes, and many speculate that increased social inequality and a lack of proper channels for ordinary Chinese to address grievances could be behind the violence.

Others have cited a lack of attention for the mentally ill in the country as another possible reason.

Han Buxin, a research fellow with the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the attacks reflect stress and social conflicts that cannot be ignored, a China Daily report said Tuesday.

Hinting at this, senior Chinese official Zhou Yongkang, at a recent meeting on maintaining stability, urged government officials to keep in close contact with local communities, get to know public opinions and solve complaints.

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by | February 4, 2010

ClimateGate: India leaves U.N. forms new climate change body

If all else fail, bail. It sounds to me that perhaps people are finally realizing that global warming is the single biggest hoax perpetrated on mankind. Ed.

India has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri

The Indian government’s move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing in the face of global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses … they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

“I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we have launched the Indian Network on Comprehensive Climate Change Assessment (INCCA),” he said.

It will bring together 125 research institutions throughout India, work with international bodies and operate as a “sort of Indian IPCC,” he added.

The body, which he said will not be rival the UN’s panel, will publish its own climate assessment in November this year, with reports on the Himalayas, India’s long coastline, the Western Ghat highlands and the north-eastern region close to the borders with Bangladesh, Burma, China and Nepal. “Through these we will demonstrate our commitment to climate science,” he said.

The UN panel’s claims of glacial meltdown by 2035 “was clearly out of place and didn’t have any scientific basis,” he said, while stressing the government remained concerned about their health of the Himalayan ice flows. “Most glaciers are melting, they are retreating, some glaciers, like the Siachen glacier, are advancing. But overall one can say incontrovertibly that the debris on our glaciers is very high the snow balance is very low. We have to be very cautious because of the water security particularly in north India which depends on the health of the Himalayan glaciers,” he added.

The new National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology will be based in Dehradun, in Uttarakhand, and will monitor glacial changes and compare results with those from glaciers in Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan.

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