Scientists find superbugs in Delhi drinking water

A girl waits to collect drinking water from a water tanker in New Delhi, March 21, 2007.

A gene that makes bugs highly resistant to almost all known antibiotics has been found in bacteria in water supplies in New Delhi used by local people for drinking, washing and cooking, scientists said on Thursday.

The NDM 1 gene, which creates what some experts describe as “super superbugs,” has spread to germs that cause cholera and dysentery, and is circulating freely in other bacteria in the Indian city capital of 14 million people, the researchers said.

“The inhabitants of New Delhi are continually being exposed to multidrug-resistant and NDM 1-positive bacteria,” said Mark Toleman of Britain’s Cardiff University School of Medicine, who published the findings in a study on Thursday.

A “substantial number” of them are consuming such bacteria on a daily basis, he told a briefing in London. “We believe we have discovered a very significant underlying source of NDM 1 in the capital city of India,” he said.

NDM 1, or New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1, makes bacteria resistant to almost all antibiotics, including the most powerful class, called carbapenems.

It first emerged in India three years ago and has now spread across the world. It has been found in a wide variety of bugs, including familiar pathogens like Escherichia coli, or E. coli.

No new drugs are on the horizon for at least 5-6 years to tackle it and experts are concerned that only a few major drug companies, such as GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, still have strong antibiotic development programs.

Toleman’s study, carried out with Cardiff University’s Timothy Walsh and published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal, investigated how common NDM 1-producing bacteria are in community waste seepage — such as water pools or rivulets in streets — and tap water in urban New Delhi.

The researchers collected 171 swabs from seepage water and 50 public tap water samples from sites within a 12 kilometer radius of central New Delhi between September and October 2010.

The NDM 1 gene was found in two of the drinking-water samples and 51 of seepage samples, the researchers said, and bacteria positive for NDM 1 were grown from two drinking-water samples and 12 seepage samples.

“We would expect that perhaps as many as half a million people are carrying NDM 1-producing bacteria as normal (gut) flora in New Dehli alone,” Toleman said.

Experts say the spread of superbugs threatens whole swathes of modern medicine, which cannot be practiced if doctors have no effective antibiotics to ward off infections during surgery, intensive care or cancer treatments like chemotherapy.

In a commentary about Walsh and Toleman’s findings, Mohd Shahid from Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College and Hospital in Uttar Pradesh, India, said global action was needed.

“The potential for wider international spread of … NDM 1 is real and should not be ignored,” he wrote.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has designated April 7 as World Health Day and under the slogan “No action today, no cure tomorrow” it is campaigning about the risks of life-saving antibiotics losing their healing power.

“We are at a critical point in time where antibiotic resistance is reaching unprecedented levels,” said Zsuzsanna Jakab, the WHO’s regional director for Europe.

“Given the growth of travel and trade in Europe and across the world, people should be aware that until all countries tackle this, no country alone can be safe.”

Source: Reuters 

Underworld goes underground

Interpol red alert subject found safe haven in Vietnam for five years

  Bunty Pandey (right) was arrested in Vietnam last October. Police said Pandey had been living in Vietnam under a false identity — Vijay Subhash Sharma, 40, labor contractor—- while running his operations in India

Smuggling, kidnapping, extortion and murders galore – Indian gangster Bunty Pandey had plenty of such crimes to his credit, and was wanted by the Indian police for at least 38 cases – and counting.

Despite an Interpol red corner notice issued for Pandey in 2002, he was nowhere to be found. Since 2002, Pandey had traveled to Nepal, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.

The mystery was solved a few months ago.

He had been living in Ho Chi Minh City for five years with his family and children as a labor contractor and consultant, it was revealed last week during a review meeting held by the southern office of the Ministry of Public Security.

Among the 89 criminals nabbed in the southern region in 2010, the prize catch was 40-yearold Prakash Pandey aka Bunty Pandey. He stayed in Vietnam as Vijay Subash Sharma.

He had obtained an Indian passport from Mumbai in 1999 impersonating as Vijay Subhash Sharma. All his subsequent passports were also in this name making it difficult for Interpol and the Indian police to track him.

The gangster was arrested at a 20th floor condominium of Nhieu Loc Apartment in Ho HCMC’s District 3, where he was living with his wife and two children, police said.

The arrest was conducted on October 22 by a joint force of Interpol Vietnam and Agency No.1 that is in charge of handling foreign-related cases, following intimation from Interpol India saying that Pandey may be in Vietnam.

Thanh Nien Weekly learned that Pandey had not stopped dabbling in crime during his stay in Vietnam, although such activities appear to have been confined to India. He was involved in extortion and blackmailing even when he was here, and the police in India’s Mumbai City had cases on him as recently as in 2009.

In fact, his involvement in what looks like human trafficking came to light the day he was deported to India. A group of 16 Indian nationals were found by local police stranded in a public park in HCMC on November 4, all but one of them without passports or other valid travel document.

They said Pandey had brought them into the country in October 2010, some days before his arrest, and taken their passports and money, promising jobs and work permits in Vietnam. Since their documents could not be found and Pandey had been deported, the workers were also repatriated. Some of the passports may have been submitted for obtaining work permits to authorities in HCMC and may still be with them, Indian embassy officials told Thanh Nien Weekly.

Vietnamese police only said they found the Indian criminal by applying “professional methods.” The Times of India, meanwhile, said police tracked him down via a SIM card issued in Vietnam.

"He had been using a SIM card issued in Vietnam but would not make calls from this number. However, he must have forgotten that he had used the same card while speaking to one of his cronies last year. The number entered our records and we started monitoring it," the paper cited an anonymous police source as saying.

"His phone was being tapped. When the name of a local gangster cropped up, the police was certain that it was Pandey who was using the SIM card. ”

Reports from India say Pandey is being kept in an isolated cell of the Mumbai crime branch’s two-storey lock up.

Indian Ambassador Ranjit Rae told Thanh Nien Weekly that this case marked “a high point of the cooperation and trust between India and Vietnam in general and the police authorities in particular.” He commended the relevant agencies of the Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security for their support in apprehending Bunty Pandey.

Asked about the trend of Indian mafia members choosing to set up camp in Southeast Asia, Rae said that “It was necessary to step-up cooperation between the law enforcement authorities of concerned countries.”

Pandey’s journey in crime began in his home state of Nainital in Uttarakhand. He came into his own in 1995, when he helped underworld Don Chota Rajan execute the killing of Thakiyuddin Wahid, managing director of East-West airlines, outside the latter’s office. Wahid had refused to pay extortion money.

His crime run continued for years. Mumbai crime branch chief Himanshu Roy said that Pandey severed ties with the Rajan gang in 2002.

The Indian police source told the Times of India: "He lived in a number of countries, including Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Singapore and Cambodia. But mostly he spent his time in Vietnam where he had a work permit and was posing as a labor contractor and consultant."

Reported by Hari Chathrattil – Bao Thien 

Does lunch in front of a computer make us eat more?

Eating while watching TV or playing on your computer might seem like a fun and efficient way to both feast your eyes and fill your stomach.

Many of us eat lunch parked in front of a computer, but that habit might be boosting our appetite for dessert, a small study suggests.

In a lab study of 44 men and women, researchers found that those who ate lunch while playing a computer game ended up eating more cookies 30 minutes later than those who’d had their lunch with no distractions.

The reason? Researchers say the computer users had a fuzzier memory of their lunch and felt less full afterward compared with the computer-free lunch group.

This suggests, they say, that distractions like computers and TV muddy our memories of mealtime, which in turn may have real effects on appetite.

"We think that memory for recent meals influences the amount of food that we select and then consume at a subsequent meal," researcher Jeffrey M. Brunstrom, of the University of Bristol in the UK, told Reuters Health in an e-mail.

"When our memory is poor," he said, "then at a subsequent meal we tend to select and consume a greater amount of food."

Past research has suggested that people are prone to eat more when they dine in front of a TV instead of at the kitchen table – possibly because they are paying more attention to the screen than to what their stomachs are telling them.

"We know from several studies that distraction can increase the amount that people consume in a meal," Brunstrom said. "Here, we extend this finding to show that the effects of distraction last beyond a meal."

The study, published in the January issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, involved 44 volunteers who were assigned to one of two groups. In one, participants ate a set lunch while playing solitaire on a computer; those in the other group had the same meal with no distractions.

Thirty minutes after the meal, both groups took a cookie "taste test," in which they could sample as many of the sweet treats as they wanted. They were also asked to recall all nine items they’d eaten at lunch, and the order in which the foods were served.

On average, the researchers found, the computer group downed roughly 250 calories’ worth of cookies, while their counterparts ate only half as much.

In addition, the computer group had more difficulty remembering the order in which their lunchtime fare was served, and typically reported feeling less full after lunch.

The findings suggest – though do not prove – that effects on memory might account for the greater cookie craving in the computer group, according to Brunstrom’s team.

The study was, of course, conducted under controlled lab conditions. Whether the findings hold true in the real world – where many factors could affect what and how much we eat – is unknown.

Brunstrom said he and his colleagues plan to study that question in the future.

For now, Brunstrom said, "one implication is that we should avoid eating while distracted, which means eating away from our computer screens and TV sets."

And what about non-technological distractions, like having a conversation during dinner or reading the newspaper at breakfast?

There’s some evidence they could thwart your diet, too. One lab study found that both eating while watching TV and eating with friends boosted calorie intake to a similar degree, versus eating distraction-free. (Eating with strangers did not, however.) Another found that people ate more when they listened to a recorded story during their meal.

Still, Brunstrom and his colleagues say their findings are particularly relevant in today’s technology-driven, "multitasking" world, where people are increasingly dining in front of a screen. And that includes children, they note; one US study found that up to a quarter of kids’ calorie intake occurs in front of a TV.

Source: Reuters 

Children’s shelter escapees lied about torture: police

Two of the four children, Huy (R) and Hai, who escaped from a shelter in Dong Nai, show police the place from which they jumped off from a railway bridge, and were injured.

The four children who sparked public outrage with their story of abuse after escaping from a shelter in Dong Nai last month were telling a tall tale, investigators said Wednesday.

Police in the province’s Bien Hoa Town said they would not open an investigation to find evidence for criminal charges against the shelter’s employees.

A 12-year-old child from the shelter, Nguyen Van Be Hai, known to be particularly naughty and the recipient of frequent censure, had encouraged four others – Nguyen Van Quyet, 13, Le Gia Huy, 5, Diep Hieu Trung, 4, and his brother Diep Tuan Khoa, 6 – to flee the shelter at around 1 a.m. on November 8.

Quyet, who woke up later and attempted to follow the other four, was later found wandering in the area, lost, and local residents returned him to the shelter, which takes care of orphaned and abandoned children.

The other four, led by Hai, took a bus to Ho Chi Minh City where they were found by a passerby and taken to the local police. They told the police they fled after being abused at the shelter.

Khoa said he was tied to a toilet and dunked in a water tank after soiling his pants.

However, investigators say the children had made up the stories.

Before fleeing the facility, Khoa had a swollen forehead and swelling around his eyes after he fell down when playing with Hai. All the other children were healthy, police said.

When climbing the shelter’s fence, Huy suffered an injury in his left thumb from a sharp iron spike.

They walked toward HCMC and stopped on a railway bridge in Bien Hoa Town’s Hoa An Commune.

When a train approached, the frightened children jumped off the six-meter-high bridge and suffered injuries.

Huy had a bleeding injury in his left hand while Khoa had a broken right arm and multiple injuries in his belly, back, waist and leg.

Investigators separated the children when taking them to the bridge and all of them identified the same place they’d jumped off from, police said.

The children then took a bus to Le Hong Phong Street in HCMC, where they were found by local resident On Diep Thanh who took them to the Ward 4 police station in District 5. Khoa and Huy were admitted to the Children’s Hospital for treatment while Hai and Trung were taken to the HCMC Social Sponsors Center.

Khoa admitted upon questioning that he had not been tortured by the shelter’s staff as he had claimed earlier.

Huy had said that his belly had been bruised by the edge of a water tank as he was tortured but police found such an injury could not have been caused by the smooth edge of the tank.

Meanwhile, Hai’s eye-witness account of Trung being dunked in a water tank early this year was also not true, investigators concluded, because the latter was actually admitted to the shelter only in June.

Earlier, a senior official at the shelter had denied all accusations and asked for a criminal investigation into the case.

“I was really shocked when they said my husband and I had seriously assaulted them,” Le Thi Thanh Lan, deputy director of the shelter, told the media.

“We consider them our own children and we were in the process of adopting [one of them]. We always bring them with us on vacations or when we go out to eat,” she said. “I have never abused them with clubs and chains as they claim. I want the police to investigate [these accusations].”

On November 10, the Youth Union branch in Dong Nai Province issued a decision to suspend Lan for one month pending an investigation into the children’s claims.

Le Thi My Phuong, director of the Dong Nai Department of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs, said the shelter has played an important role in protecting and taking care of the orphans and abandoned children.

The children have since been returned to the shelter they escaped from, and Lan’s suspension has been lifted.

Reported by Anh Thu 

Breast-fed boys do better at school: study

A baby bottle-fed in Ho Chi Minh City. Infants breast-fed for six months or longer, especially boys, perform better academically than bottle-fed children at school, a study has found.

A new study has found that infants breast-fed for six months or longer, especially boys, perform better academically than bottle-fed children at school, newswire HealthDay News recently reported.

The study, published online December 20 in Pediatrics – the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, was conducted by Wendy Oddy, a researcher at the Australia-based Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, and her colleagues.

According to the news source, the study group surveyed the academic scores at age 10 of more than 1,000 children in Western Australia.

After adjusting for gender, family income, maternal factors, and early stimulation at home like reading to children, the study found that babies breast-fed for six months or longer had higher academic scores on standardized tests than those breast-fed for less than six months.

However, the improvements were only significant from a statistical point of view for the boys, according to the study.

In fact, the surveyed boys were found to score better in math, reading, spelling and writing if they were breast-fed six months or more, while girls had a small but statistically insignificant benefit in reading scores, HealthDay News quoted the study as saying.

The reason for the gender difference is unclear.

But, Oddy said that the protective role of breast milk on the brain and its later consequences for language development may have greater benefits for boys because they are more vulnerable during critical development periods.

Dr. Ruth Lawrence, director of the Breastfeeding and Human Lactation Study Center at the University Of Rochester School Of Medicine in New York said that the new findings should not discourage mothers from breastfeeding their daughters, because human milk has nutrients important for brain development for both sexes.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), less than 20 percent of infants in Vietnam are breastfed exclusively during the first six months.

The organization estimates the average rate of exclusive breastfeeding for Asia at 42 percent.

Source: Thanh Nien 

Loan sharks scam HCMC students

Students unable to repay debts fear for their limbs

Binh left his home in a nearby province and came to Ho Chi Minh City with dreams of a degree.

Struggling with the high costs of living in the city, he failed to pay his university fees in October and ended up borrowing VND5 million (US$256) from a friend.

When the friend asked him to return the money, Binh reluctantly went to one of the many loan sharks that lend money to cash-strapped students in the city.

“I had no choice. Banks and legal loan services won’t give me loans because I have no assets [to mortgage],” he said.

At a money lender’s in an alley off Tran Hung Dao Street in District 1, just steps away from the dormitories of the HCMC University of Economics and the HCMC University of Natural Sciences, Binh was “approved” for a loan at an interest rate of 21 percent per month.

To legalize the loan, Binh was made to sign a document saying he received the money as a deposit for a laptop he would deliver later.

Before he left, the lender warned the student with dire consequences if he failed to pay his debts. “They threatened to contact my family and cut off my limbs,” he said. Thankfully, he was able to pay off his debts within ten days.

But another student, Tu, was not that lucky. He was threatened and seriously bullied all November after failing to pay interest on a loan of VND11 million ($564). Fearing for his limbs and life, Tu borrowed money from his sister to pay off the interest. But he is still mired in debt.

According to Tu, hundreds of students have borrowed money from the same lender, identified only as C.

The 47 universities in HCMC attract thousands of students every year from around the country, especially the southern provinces. Loan sharks lurk around the universities and thrive on ripping off broke students.

Students get mired in extortionate interest rates, often ending up struggling to pay off just the interest, without any hope of getting out of debt.

Abundant bloodsuckers

Following a complaint from a victim student, Thanh Nien conducted an investigation and found hundreds of students who have seen their hardships turn into horrors.

Disguised as a relative repaying a student’s debt, a Thanh Nien reporter found that the loan shark popularly known as C. belongs to a ring with at least three unlicensed lenders around universities in HCMC.

He was told that he could pay the interest at any of the other “branches” in the city – at Street No. 2 near University of Technology in District 10, at D5 Street near a branch of Foreign Trade University in Binh Thanh District, and in the Thu Duc university area in Thu Duc District.

The service on D5 Street appears to be a pawn shop with a board advertising “low-interest loans with easy procedures.” A man called H. directed the “customer” to a nearby service on D2 Street to discuss the loan. However, he refused to lend money when the reporter presented an invalid student card.

Another loan shark in H.’s racket said many other loan sharks in Thu Duc university area charged even higher interest rates, of VND40,000 per day on a VND1 million loan, which works out to be 120 percent per month.

H. also claimed that the ring has tight connections with government and police officials who protect the illegal services.

According to state regulations, interest rates should be no more than 150 percent of the benchmark interest rate set by the State Bank of Vietnam. At the moment, the benchmark rate is 9 percent per annum, and the maximum interest rates charged by money lenders should not exceed 13.5 percent. Violating lenders can be punished by jail terms of up to three years and fines up to ten times the involved interest amount.

INVESTIGATION UNDERWAY

Following Thanh Nien’s report published Monday (December 6), the police in District 1 summoned 28-year-old Nguyen Manh Cuong, previously identified as C., for interrogation. Cuong, who operates the money-lending service on Tran Hung Dao Street confessed he had lent money to students at a monthly interest of 21 percent. He also admitted that he had forced borrowers to sign false documents saying they received the money as a deposit for laptops. However, he failed to say how many students had borrowed money from him. A subsequent police raid of his facility found records of 29 students who had borrowed a total of VND185 million. The police also found several leaflets introducing his services. Police said Cuong has so far not revealed any connections with other loansharks’ services in Binh Thanh District or elsewhere in the city. A District 1 police officer said they are investigating the case and are determined to crack down on the loan sharks. Meanwhile, several students who had borrowed money from Cuong told Thanh Nien that they received anonymous phone calls instructing them to pay their debt at a facility in Binh Thanh District. The Binh Thanh District police told Thanh Nien they would verify the information about the loan sharks operating in their jurisdiction.

Reported by Thanh Nien staff 

18th century coins found in northern Vietnam

Twenty four kilograms of coins dating back to the 18th century were found at a private residence in Hai Phong City.

The coins were handed over to the city museum this week, said Do Xuan Trung, the vice-director of the museum.

Nguyen Van Bay was reconstructing a small wooden pier over a pond outside his house in Quoc Tuan Commune, An Lao District, when he found the ancient coins.

Trung said that after cleaning and sorting, they found some of the coins had been minted during the reign of China’s Qianlong Emperor while others had been produced by uprising peasants under Vietnam’s Le Dynasty in the 18th century.

The coins were packed in a ruddy wave-patterned jar and hidden in the pond. The zinc-bronze doubloons have taken on a dark, rusty color over the years.

Bay’s family was rewarded by the museum for their discovery and their willingness to hand it over the museum, according to the vice director.

Trung said the city museum has a vast collection of ancient coins but no archeologist to date and uncover the history behind them. The ancient treasures are gathering dust in the museum for lack of expert care. The newly discovered coins face a similar fate.

Source: Lao Dong