China was reeling Tuesday from its worst earthquake in three decades which left tens of thousands of people dead, missing or trapped under crushed houses, schools and factories.

Rescuers were struggling to reach towns and villages devastated by Monday’s huge 7.8 magnitude quake in southwestern Sichuan province, which is still being pummeled by wave after wave of terrifying aftershocks.

The death toll was officially nearly 10,000, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency, but that figure was expected to rise dramatically with at least 10,000 people alone buried in Mianzhu city in Sichuan.

Up to 5,000 people have been killed in one district, Beichuan, where 80 percent of buildings collapsed, according to Xinhua.

“Several thousand” were reported killed or buried in the nearby town of Hanwang after a factory collapsed, while over 600 people died and 2,300 were buried in Shifang city where there was a major chemical leak.

More than 18 hours after the quake struck, there was still little news out of Wenchuan county, a poor mountainous region of around 112,000 people situated in the epicenter.

Hundreds were feared buried at Juyan Middle School in Dujiangyan city, about 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the epicenter, and rescuers have pulled about 60 bodies from the rubble so far.

Dujiangyan resident Wen Xiaoping was standing over his mother’s body, covered on the ground with a sheet of plastic, after he and his neighbours dug through collapsed rubble to find her.

“I lost everything. I lost my house and I lost my mother,” said Wen.

“My brother is in hospital with severe injuries to his chest. I’m waiting for someone to come and pick up the body. But no-one has come yet,” he said.

Police were seen pulling out other bodies, many badly battered, from the rubble of one collapsed building, placing them in a row out the front.

Pictures posted on Chinese Internet news sites showed rescuers standing atop huge slabs of shattered concrete at the Juyan Middle School as cranes tried to lift away massive chunks of rubble.

Some buried teenagers were struggling to break loose from underneath the ruins, while others were pinned under rubble and crying out for help. Grieving parents watched as cranes were excavating at the site.

Foreigners were among the dead or missing, with 37 tourists  killed when their coach was buried in a landslide in Aba prefecture in Sichuan. Officials said they had also lost contact with 15 British tourists, state media reported.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao warned the situation in the quake zone was severe as China mobilised its 2.3 million-strong armed forces to spearhead the search and rescue effort.

“The situation is worse than we previously estimated and we need more people here to help,” Premier Wen said, speaking at the disaster relief headquarters in Dujiangyan.

President Hu Jintao urged an “all-out” effort to rescue victims and the authorities announced an initial allocation of 200 million yuan (29 million dollars) of relief funds.

World powers including the United States, the European Union, Russia and Japan rallied around China with sympathy and pledges of help.

The huge quake struck at 2.28 pm on Monday and rocked skyscrapers up to 1,800 kilometres (1,200 miles) away in cities across China and parts of Southeast Asia, where panicked residents fled into the streets.

The quake hit in the middle of the day when schools, factories and offices were full. While many buildings in larger cities withstood the impact, buildings in rural areas would not have been built to withstand such a large quake.

The area had been rocked by more than 1,180 aftershocks of up to magnitude six as of 5:00 am on Tuesday, the Sichuan provincial seismological bureau said.

Relief forces were battling to reach the worst-hit areas of Wenchuan county approaching on foot, Xinhua said, as vehicles were not able to use the road littered with rocks and boulders.

All lines of communication were cut with the county, which is also home to the Wolong Nature Reserve, China’s leading research and breeding base for endangered giant pandas.

But an official in Wenchuan managed to appeal for emergency aid via a satellite phone, Xinhua reported.

“We are in urgent need of tents, food, medicine and satellite communications equipment through air drop,” Xinhua quoted Wang Bin, Communist Party secretary of the county, as saying.

“We also need medical workers to save the injured people here.”

The health ministry dispatched emergency medical teams to Wenchuan and the Chinese Red Cross sent tents and quilts.

The quake’s epicentre was about 93 kilometres from Chengdu, a city of more than 12 million people, and 260 kilometres from Chongqing and its 30 million population.

The death toll is the highest for a quake in China since 242,000 people perished when the northern city of Tangshan was flattened in 1976.

Heavy marijuana use can boost blood levels of a particular protein, perhaps raising a person’s risk of a heart attack or stroke, U.S. government researchers said on Tuesday.

Dr. Jean Lud Cadet of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National Institutes of Health, said the findings point to another example of long-term harm from marijuana. But marijuana activists expressed doubt about the findings.

Cadet said a lot of previous research has focused on the effects of marijuana on the brain. His team looked elsewhere in the body, measuring blood protein levels in 18 long-term, heavy marijuana users and 24 other people who did not use the drug.

Levels of a protein called apolipoprotein C-III were found to be 30 percent higher in the marijuana users compared to the others. This protein is involved in the body’s metabolism of triglycerides — a type of fat found in the blood — and higher levels cause increased levels of triglycerides, Cadet added.

High levels of triglycerides can contribute to hardening of the arteries or thickening of the artery walls, raising the risk of stroke, heart attack and heart disease.

The study did not look at whether the heavy marijuana users actually had heart disease.

“Chronic marijuana use is not only causing people to get high, it’s actually causing long-term adverse effects in patients who use too much of the drug,” Cadet, whose study is in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, said in a telephone interview. “Chronic marijuana abuse is not so benign.”

The marijuana users in the study averaged smoking 78 to 350 marijuana cigarettes per week, based on self-reported drug history, the researchers said.

The researchers said the active ingredient in marijuana, known as THC, seems to overstimulate marijuana receptors in the liver, leading to overproduction of the protein.

RAISING FUTURE RISK

Cadet said higher levels of the protein in marijuana users could raise future risk for cardiac abnormalities, blood flow problems, heart attack and stroke.

People with major medical or psychiatric illness, alcohol dependency and other drug use such as cocaine or heroin were excluded from the study.

A U.S. group supporting legal sales and regulation of marijuana disputed the findings. Marijuana Policy Project spokesman Bruce Mirken said, for example, the study involved people who were extremely heavy users.

“I think the low end was 78 joints a week. That’s 10 or 11 joints a day,” Mirken said in a telephone interview.

“We’re talking about people who are stoned all the time. We’re talking about the marijuana equivalent of the guy in the alley clutching a bottle of cheap wine. If you do anything to that level of excess, it might well have some untoward effects, whether it’s marijuana or wine or broccoli,” Mirken added.

Cadet’s team said the findings suggest long-term harm from marijuana beyond issues such as impaired learning, poor memory retention and retrieval and perceptual abnormalities.

But Mirken said: “Even if you take this finding at face value, it’s not at all clear that it has any relevance to the real world because there is still no data showing higher rates of mortality among marijuana smokers. If this was a significant cause of cardiovascular disease, where are the bodies?”

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Doina Chiacu)

New research shows “alarming levels” of obesity in most ethnic groups in the United States, principal investigator Dr. Gregory L. Burke, of Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina told Reuters Health. The study also confirms the potentially deadly toll obesity exacts on the heart and blood vessels.

“The obesity epidemic has the potential to reduce further gains in U.S. life expectancy, largely through an effect on cardiovascular disease mortality (death),” Burke and colleagues warn in the latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.

Among 6,814 middle-age or older adults participating in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, or “MESA” study, researchers found that more than two thirds of white, African American and Hispanic participants were overweight and one third to one half were obese.

Obesity rates were far lower in Chinese Americans in the study, with 33 percent overweight and just 5 percent obese, suggesting, Burke said, that high rates of obesity should not considered “inevitable.”

The investigators also found that obese adults, compared with normal-weight adults, had higher rates of high blood pressure (up to more than twice as high), abnormal lipids (two- to three-fold higher), and diabetes, despite a “huge number” being on costly medications to lower blood pressure and lipid levels and control diabetes, Burke said.

“As the obesity numbers increase further, we will spend an even larger amount of health care dollars just treating risk factors,” Burke said.

Obese adults also had more silent vascular disease (blood vessel disease that causes no symptoms); they had more atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and thicker heart walls, even after adjusting for “traditional” risk factors like high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels.

Given the higher amount of silent blood vessel disease with obesity, Burke said “one could worry that this will cause us to reverse our 50-year decline in cardiovascular disease mortality due to the obesity epidemic.” This will likely be accompanied by an increase in diabetes, other heart disease risk factors, and silent disease - “on top of the aging of the baby boom generation.”

“Our findings support the imperative to redouble our efforts to assist in increasing healthy behaviors and to remove…barriers to maintaining a healthy weight,” Burke and colleagues conclude.

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, May 12, 2008.

News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it’s a step toward creating “designer babies.”

But an author of the study says the work was focused on stem cells. He notes that the researchers used an abnormal embryo that could never have developed into a baby anyway.

“None of us wants to make designer babies,” said Dr. Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

The idea of designer babies is that someday, scientists may insert particular genes into embryos to produce babies with desired traits like intelligence or athletic ability. Some people find that notion repugnant, saying it turns children into designed objects, and would create an unequal society where some people are genetically enriched while others would be considered inferior.

The study appears to be the first report of genetically modifying a human embryo. It was presented last fall at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, but didn’t draw widespread public attention then. The result was reported over the weekend by The Sunday Times of London, which said British authorities highlighted the work in a recent report.

Rosenwaks and colleagues did the work with an embryo that had extra chromosomes, making it nonviable. Following a standard procedure used in animals, they inserted a gene that acts as a marker that can be easily followed over time. The embryo cells took up the gene, he said.

The goal was to see if a gene introduced into an abnormal embryo could be traced in stem cells that are harvested from the embryo, he said. Such work could help shed light on why abnormal embryos fail to develop, he said.

No stem cells were recovered from the human embryo, said Rosenwaks, noting that abnormal embryos frequently don’t develop well enough to produce them.

Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, said the Cornell scientists were developing techniques that others might use to make genetically modified people, “and they’re doing it without any kind of public debate.”

A London-based group called Human Genetics Alert similarly criticized the work.

But Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said she’s not troubled by the work. She said the idea of successfully modifying babies by inserting genes remains a technically daunting challenge.

“We’re not even close to having that technology in hand to be able to do it right,” she said, and it would be ethically unacceptable to try it when it’s unsafe.

___

On the Net:

Center for Genetics and Society: http://www.geneticsandsociety.org

Human Genetics Alert: http://www.hgalert.org

Genetics and Public Policy Center: http://www.dnapolicy.org

There isn’t anything metropolitan about this tiny unincorporated town in southwest Wyoming, where a few single-family homes and a volunteer fire station stand against a skyline of snowcapped mountains.

But Boulder, with a population of just 75 people, has one thing in common with major metropolitan areas: air pollution thick enough to pose health risks.

“Used to be you could see horizon to horizon, crystal clear. Now you got this,” said Craig Jensen as he gestured to a pale blue sky that he says is not as deeply colored as it used to be. “Makes you wonder what it’s going to do to the grass, the trees and the birds.”

The pollution, largely from the region’s booming natural gas industry, came in the form of ground-level ozone, which has exceeded healthy levels 11 times since January and caused Wyoming to issue its first ozone alerts. Now the ozone threatens to cost the industry and taxpayers millions of dollars to stay within federal clean-air laws.

Sublette County is home to one of the largest natural gas reserves in North America, and it is dotted with hundreds of gas wells to supply the nation’s growing demand for cleaner-burning fuel. Thousands more wells are planned for the future.

But pollution from vehicles and equipment in the gas fields — along with dust, weather and geography — have raised ozone to a level that rivals those of big cities in the summertime.

Wyoming’s ozone problem comes at a time when the federal government has strengthened its ozone restrictions to better protect public health. In March, the Environmental Protection Agency set a new ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, down from 80 parts per billion.

The peak eight-hour average for ozone near Boulder reached 122 parts per billion on Feb. 21 and 102 parts per billion on March 11. By comparison, the Los Angeles area hit a peak average of 152 parts per billion last summer, and Denver recorded a peak of 98 parts per billion last July.

Failure to meet federal air-quality standards could result in mandatory pollution-cutting measures ranging from restricting wood-burning stoves in homes to placing limits on the booming oil and gas industry.

Jeremy Nichols, director of the Denver-based Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action, said all economic development in the region — not just the energy industry — could be affected.

“If we don’t get ahead of the curve, we could be suffering serious consequences in the future,” Nichols said.

Conservation groups have seized on the ozone alerts in their efforts to curb drilling for natural gas in the area.

“Obviously, the pace and level of development is just too much,” said Linda Baker of the Upper Green River Valley Coalition.

The energy industry says it has been working with regulators to ease the problem and insists drilling should not be curtailed.

Ozone is a component of smog, a yellowish haze of pollutants that lingers near ground level and can raise the risk of asthma and heart attacks, especially among the elderly and children with respiratory illnesses.

Ozone needs sunlight to form, and state environmental officials believe the ozone levels in Wyoming this past winter and spring were exacerbated by heavy snowcover, which intensified the sunlight by reflecting it off the snow. In 2007, when the area had little snowcover, there were no elevated ozone readings.

Also contributing to the situation are rare temperature inversions, when cold air is trapped close to the ground, and the surrounding mountains, which enclose the pollution in the Green River valley.

Gas developers in the area are sharing information on how best to reduce ozone, according to Randy Teeuwan, a spokesman for Encana Corp., one of the largest gas suppliers. Encana already is using natural gas-powered drilling rigs that emit less pollution, and it is consolidating field operations to reduce emissions.

State officials are working with the industry to reduce emissions without waiting for new federal regulations to take effect.

“We understand that the people who are living up there cannot wait two or three years for us to develop regulatory tools,” said David Finley with the state Department of Environmental Quality.

For instance, the state is considering a plan that, when conditions appear ripe for ozone formation, would ask companies to curtail truck traffic or use more drilling rigs powered by cleaner-burning natural gas.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Land Management is reviewing a proposal by several companies to allow nearly 4,400 more wells in the county.

Jim Sewell, environmental project manager with Shell Exploration and Production, said the expansion project would have lower emissions than existing facilities. The companies also are offering $36 million to pay for environmental monitoring and other measures that lessen the effects of drilling on air quality, wildlife and plants.

Jensen, whose family has lived in this part of Wyoming for four generations, said he has seen both sides of gas development.

On one hand, he has received royalties from wells on his land, enabling him to buy a boat, snowmobiles and other “toys.”

But the pollution leaves Jensen longing for the days of clear skies, little traffic and fewer people.

“I’d give it up right now if all them rigs moved,” he said.

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.), the likely Republican Presidential nominee, stayed true to GOP principles Apr. 29 when he unveiled a health-care reform proposal that leans heavily on competition rather than government intervention. He also wants to see the states take a far greater role in fostering that competition and in forming risk pools that would insure coverage for the sickest citizens.

The last of the three remaining Presidential candidates to unveil a detailed health proposal, McCain’s is also the least radical. He is against mandates, instead proposing universal coverage would emerge through the use of tax credits and a more competitive insurance marketplace. McCain wants to do away with the tax exemption on employer-provided insurance. Instead, he would give a $2,500 annual tax credit to individuals, and $5,000 to families, to purchase their own coverage.

McCain’s plan is meant to encourage individuals to purchase their insurance and free companies from the heavy cost of providing coverage. His theory is that employees would take their tax credit and flock to the open market, where they could shop around for the plan that best meets their needs. Insurance companies would have to become more competitive to win their business.

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey released last year found the average annual premium of an employer-based insurance policy is $12,000, of which employees pay about one-third.

Consumer Control?

Health care in America “should be available to all, and not limited by where you work or how much you make,” McCain said in a speech delivered in Tampa at the University of South Florida’s H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute. He wants to give control over the health-care system to patients. “When families are informed about medical choices, they are more capable of making their own decisions, less likely to choose the most expensive and often unnecessary options, and are more satisfied with their choices.”

For the sickest Americans who would find it hard to buy affordable coverage in an open market, McCain wants the states to form risk pools, or what he calls Guaranteed Access Plans. He also said there would be “reasonable limits” on premiums, and federal assistance for those below a certain income level.

McCain’s campaign staff said the proposal would cost about $10 billion a year in reduced federal tax revenues and subsidized coverage for the poor. The plan’s costs would be offset, in theory, by reduced government payments through Medicare and Medicaid for emergency room use by the uninsured, increased use of information technology, and adoption of best-care practices for chronic illnesses. McCain also proposed malpractice reform.

Contrasts and Criticisms

The plan contrasts sharply with those proposed by the Democratic candidates, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Both of them call for a national public insurance (BusinessWeek.com, 3/31/0 program that would cover everyone at the same rate regardless of their health status. Employers would either have to provide coverage for all employees or contribute to the public program. Clinton also wants a mandate that would require all Americans to get health insurance. Clinton’s plan would cost an estimated $110 billion, offset partly by rolling back Bush Administration tax cuts. Obama’s plan would cost $50 billion to $60 billion, with the same offset.

McCain dismissed the government-centered proposals of the Democratic candidates, saying that if enacted “we will replace the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of the current system with the inefficiency, irrationality, and uncontrolled costs of a government monopoly.”

Both Democratic candidates were quick to criticize McCain’s proposal, with Clinton calling it a radical approach that could lead to millions losing their employer-based insurance. “While people might have a ‘choice’ of getting such coverage, employers would have no incentive to provide it,” she said in a prepared statement. Obama said in a statement that “John McCain is recycling the same failed policies that didn’t work when George Bush first proposed them, and won’t work now.”

Harvard Business School professor Regina Herzlinger, a leading proponent of consumer choice in health care, says McCain’s plan is both “not enough and too much.” That is, the tax credit is too high for healthy individuals and too low for those with chronic illnesses. She also feels the plan does little to address the high cost of health care.