Death toll in Tianjin explosions reaches 112; more than 90 still missing

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By Steven Jiang, Will Ripley and Michael Pearson, CNN

August 16, 2015

Tianjin, China (CNN)Crews searched for an unknown number of civilians and soldiers Saturday who are believed trapped by multiple explosions that killed at least 112 people this week in this eastern Chinese city.

As of Sunday morning, more than 50 people have been rescued in Tianjin, city government spokesman Gong Jiansheng said. They include a 19-year-old firefighter who lay on the ground for hours with burns and a cracked skull until he was found, officials said.

Relatives of some of the 95 people missing, mainly firefighters, stormed an official news conference demanding to know the whereabouts of their loved ones. Families wrote the names of missing people on posters lining a street outside a temporary shelter near the rescue site.

On Saturday, fires sent plumes of black smoke skyward near where explosions devastated a chemical warehouse in Tianjin on Wednesday.

But officials denied news reports that an evacuation order had been immediately issued for everyone within 1.8 miles (3 kilometers), with Gong calling the reports "false information."

The Beijing News, citing the People's Armed Police Force, had reported the evacuation order. CNN has reported that at least one disaster recovery shelter is located within the reported evacuation zone.

However, photographs made it appear that vehicles in a parking lot had caught fire rather than new explosions having taken place at the warehouse, as the Xinhua news agency had reported.

'Lessons paid for with blood'

Chinese President Xi Jinping said Saturday that the Tianjin blasts and other recent accidents exposed severe problems in workplace safety and urged authorities to heed "safe growth" and "people's interest first" in efforts to avoid such accidents, Xinhua reported.

The president also "urged authorities to learn from the 'extremely profound' lessons paid for with blood" in the Tianjin explosions, Xinhua reported.

Xi is demanding improvements to workplace safety, the agency added.

The first blasts on Wednesday, one of which carried the equivalent of more than 20 tons of TNT, left more than 700 people injured and thousands homeless, officials said. A man around 40 years old was reported to have been rescued from the site on Saturday.

Flames at the warehouse appeared Friday to be largely extinguished but residents worried about lingering contamination.

"I asked my in-laws to take my daughter home. I don't want them to stay here," Tian Binyan, a migrant worker, said. "I'm worried. I heard it's going to rain later and that would make the air toxic."

She was among the 6,000 people displaced by the fire and explosions that rocked the port Wednesday night, sending fireballs many stories high.

What chemicals did the warehouse store?

Tianjin officials said they were unable to give a detailed list of the chemicals stored at the warehouse.

Gao Huaiyou, the deputy director of the city's Work Safety Administration, said Friday the warehouse was a temporary storage facility. Materials were kept there briefly after they arrived at the port and before they were transported elsewhere.

The warehouse was destroyed by the explosions, he told reporters at a news conference, and managers of the facility have provided "insufficient information" about what was stored there.

But sodium cyanide, a highly toxic chemical that can kill humans rapidly, was one of them, Gao said.

The environmental group Greenpeace, citing a local monitoring station, said it believed other dangerous chemicals stored at the site included toluene diisocyanate and calcium carbide.

Gao said further investigation, including checks of customs records, would be needed to establish the types and amounts of the chemicals at the warehouse.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/15/asia/china-tianjin-explosions/

Dengue fever: How a mosquito infected millions, and not with malaria

week4 Meera Senthilingam, for CNN
September 2, 2015

A bite from a single mosquito can result in fever, headaches, and pain. Severe cases can experience a multitude of symptoms including bleeding, shock, organ failure -- and potentially death.

There is no treatment or vaccine and no real means of protecting yourself in countries endemic for the disease.

Though affected countries were once few, today more than 100 harbor the risk of infection -- putting more than half the world's population at risk and resulting in 50 million infections each year.

Read: This man's blood saved 2 million babies

The infection is Dengue -- formerly known as "break-bone fever" because of the severe joint points it causes -- and it's spread by one of nature's toughest, most versatile mosquitoes -- and it's not the one that spreads malaria.

Coexisting with humans

"It lives, eats and breathes humans" says Duane Gubler, professor of Infectious Diseases at Duke University Medical School, Singapore. Gubler has been working on Dengue control for more than 45 years and founded the Dengue Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). He has witnessed the epidemic expanding globally -- through the opportunistic mosquitoes harboring the disease.

"Urbanization provided the ideal ecology for these mosquitoes," says Gubler, referring to the increased density of populations as people flock to cities in search of employment, bringing with them endless supplies of blood for pregnant mosquitoes that need to nourish their eggs.

Read: The worms that invade your brain

The villain carrying the Dengue virus is the Aedes mosquito and it comes in two forms: Aedes Aegyti and Aedes albopictus, with the former causing the greatest degree of infection. "They've become highly urbanized and highly adapted to humans," says Gubler.

This species can also carry the virus behind other diseases such as Yellow fever, chikungunya and lymphatic filariasis. But Dengue is the disease that has spread most widely. Their success lies in their ability to bite during the day -- unlike the mosquitoes harboring malaria -- meaning they're difficult to avoid.

What can be done?

"Dengue is one of the diseases we haven't been so successful in tackling or curbing," says Dirk Engels, director of the Neglected Tropical Diseases department at the World Health Organization. "We don't have easy tools to curb the spread of Dengue," he says.

Engels hopes collaborations with pesticide producers could enable better designed programs to kill mosquitoes in the field. Another -- more novel -- strategy is the use of sterilized male mosquitoes to prevent future breeding.

"We've got to prevent transmission," warns Gubler. In his eyes, the tools needed are mosquito control, drugs and a vaccine -- the latter of which is now starting to show promise in terms of protection.

Six vaccines against Dengue have reached clinical trial stages to date and Gubler predicts three of the lead candidates will soon be licensed. Leading the way is pharmaceutical company Sanofi, whose vaccine was shown to cut incidence of the virus by 61% in late-stage trials.

This level of protection is enough to make a difference. "Even though it's only partially effective, they'll have public health utility," says Gubler, who describes the search for a drug to treat the disease as a long road, with no trials for their efficacy reached just yet -- but he's hopeful.

"In the next three to five years we'll see one or more antivirals come on as well," he says.

With drugs and vaccines finally in the pipeline, the disease could be tackled head on -- but not stopped completely.

"We'll never eradicate it," says Gubler. "But if we can use these new tools, we can control it as a public health problem."

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/01/health/dengue-fever-mosquito/

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