Road kit to be kept by county
Lepers to live in comfort
The Chairman of the District Highways Board No 16 wrote asking if the Waikouaiti County Council would take over the road construction plant now being purchased by the board, to be used on the work of re-forming the Waitati road when that work was completed, and also if the council wished the board to procure a tractor for it. It was decided that the council should take over the plant at the end of September, provided a sufficient amount were allowed for depreciation. With regard to the tractor the councildesired to make its own arrangements.
The nine lepers, consisting of four Maoris, two Chinese, and three Europeans, who are shortly to be transferred from Quail Island, Lyttelton Harbour, to Mokogai leper station in the Fiji group, are assured of a delightful home. Dr Frengley, of Auckland Hospital, who returned to Auckland on Thursday by the Navua after five weeks among typhoid cases at Suva, had the opportunity of visiting Mokogai, and stated that it was one of the most beautiful and attractive islands that could be found anywhere. Mokogai, an island with an area of about five square miles, lies about 25 miles north-east of Levuka. "There are some 300 lepers living on this delightful place," said Dr Frengley, "and I am told that many who recover from the scourge of leprosy do not want to leave it. Here in a tropical climate, surrounded by all the beauties of Nature, the lepers pass away the time as happily as is possible. Indeed, the New Zealand lepers could not go to a better place." Dr Neff, a Canadian, was in charge of the station, and he had eight nuns assisting. They were wonderful people, and were doing splendid work. The island was equipped with schools and an up-to-date hospital with proper wards, etc. Everything possible was done to ensure the happiness of the lepers. Few of the lepers were in a bad state, and the majority of them were improving. Marriage is prohibited, and the men and the women live in different settlements. Both sexes are allowed to intermingle, however, at certain periods during the day. The lepers grew all their own food and were paid for their labour. They also ran a co-operative store, and generally spent their earnings in small luxuries. The community was run by lepers for lepers. They had their own policemen. All the patients at present at Quail Island have consented to go to Mokogai. The Quail Island station will be closed, and the cost of maintenance of the lepers at Mokogai will be borne by the New Zealand Government.
Wood for the trees
In this virgin land we suffered from a plethora of forest, and such was our reckless human nature that we had destroyed with both hands what should really have been preserved. The pioneer had to cut down trees to make room for pasture and cropping land, and the removal of the pristine forest from good land was wise and essential. But, unfortunately, this spirit of destruction was let loose indiscriminately, and mile upon endless mile of forest had been destroyed for the sake of a range of scraggy hill pasture whereon a few disconsolate sheep eked out a miserable existence. The land steadily deteriorated by erosion, and the rainstorms descended upon it, and with nothing to check them carried away even the scanty soil rushing it down in muddy cascades to silt up the creeks and rivers. — ODT, 20.6.1925
Compiled by Peter Dowden
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NZ Herald
6 days ago
- NZ Herald
Many lung cancers are now in non-smokers. Scientists want to know why
'My family needs me,' she recalled thinking. Chen's case represents a confounding reality for doctors who study and treat lung cancer, the deadliest cancer in the United States. The disease's incidence and death rates have dropped over the last few decades, thanks largely to a decline in cigarette use, but lung cancers unrelated to smoking have persisted. The thinking used to be that smoking was 'almost the only cause of lung cancer', said Dr Maria Teresa Landi, a senior investigator at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. However, worldwide roughly 10% to 25% of lung cancers now occur in people who have never smoked. Among certain groups of Asian and Asian American women, that share is estimated to be 50% or more. These cancers are increasingly drawing the attention of researchers like Landi, who are studying the role that environmental exposures, genetic mutations, or other risk factors might play. They have already found some early hints, including a clear link to air pollution. Physicians are also testing new approaches to better detect lung cancer in non-smokers. They are trying to understand why it is more prevalent: in people of Asian ancestry; in women; and why it is being seen among younger people. 'We all still think about the Marlboro man as what lung cancer looks like,' said Dr Heather Wakelee, chief of oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In many cases, though, that's no longer true. 'We're just baffled as to why,' she said. Looking for Clues Many lung cancers in non-smokers have no known cause and are discovered only by chance. That was the case for Sandra Liu, 59, who lives in New Jersey. Liu was diagnosed this year with adenocarcinoma, the most common type of lung cancer among non-smokers. Doctors found the mass after she had a full-body check-up during a visit to China — a process popular with some Chinese expatriates visiting the country that includes a chest scan. 'I would have never thought to go for a CT,' she said, noting she had no major symptoms and never smoked. Scientists are starting to see that the biology of cancer in non-smokers like Liu differs from cancers seen in people with a smoking history — and may require different strategies for prevention and detection. One large study, called 'Sherlock Lung' and led by Landi and colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, is looking at the mutational signatures, or patterns of mutations across the cancer genomes, of 871 non-smokers with lung cancer from around the world. Their latest findings, published in Nature this month, showed that certain mutations, or changes to DNA, were much more common in people who lived in areas with high amounts of air pollution — for example, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Uzbekistan. More pollution was linked to more mutations. The study did not include data from India, considered to have the highest levels of outdoor pollution. The researchers didn't just find that pollution may directly damage DNA. They also saw signs that pollution causes cells to divide more rapidly, which further increases the likelihood of cancer. Studies have also shown that people who don't smoke but have a family history of lung cancer, such as Chen and Liu — both of Liu's grandfathers had the disease — are at increased risk. This could be because of shared genetics, a common environment or both, said Dr Jae Kim, chief of thoracic surgery at City of Hope in Duarte, California. And scientists know that non-smokers with lung cancer are more likely than people who smoked to have certain kinds of 'driver' mutations, changes to the genome that can cause cancer and drive its spread, Kim said. In contrast, people who smoke tend to accumulate many mutations over time that can eventually lead to cancer. This difference in the type of mutations may be one reason why lung cancer among people under-50 is more prevalent among nonsmokers than smokers. Leah Phillips at her home in Peewee Valley, Kentucky. Photo / Jon Cherry, the New York Times There are probably other factors, too, including exposure to radon, asbestos and possibly aristolochic acid, a compound once common in traditional Chinese medicine. Landi's research linked the compound to lung cancer mutations among Taiwanese patients. Taiwan banned products containing it in 2003. Studies from Asia have also suggested second-hand smoke, fumes from cooking oils, and a history of tuberculosis or other lung disease as possible culprits. However, these potential contributors are less common in the US, where Asian American women who don't smoke are still nearly twice as likely as other women to be diagnosed with the disease, said Scarlett Gomez, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco. To understand what's driving the disparity in the US, Gomez, Wakelee and colleagues at other Northern California institutions are now studying the relationships among genes, environmental contaminants and lung cancer in Asian American non-smoking women. 'Ultimately, we want to be able to come up with actionable risk factors, just like we do for breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Gomez said. Revisiting Screening Guidance Studies like Gomez's may help address the question of who should be screened for lung cancer. In the US, routine screening is recommended only for people aged 50 to 80 who smoked at least the equivalent of one pack of cigarettes per day for 20 years. Because of that, lung cancer in non-smokers is often not caught until it's advanced, said Dr Elaine Shum, an oncologist at NYU Langone Health. That can have devastating consequences for patients like Chen, who is still undergoing treatment after a third metastasis of her cancer. Shum and others are now exploring whether screening should be expanded. In Taiwan, a nationwide trial tested the effectiveness of CT scans in people aged 55 to 75 who never smoked but had one other risk factor. Doctors detected cancer in 2.6% of patients — enough that Taiwan now offers routine screening for non-smokers with a family history of lung cancer. Shum and colleagues recently ran a similar pilot study among women of Asian ancestry who were 40 to 74 and had never smoked. In preliminary results from about 200 patients, they found invasive cancer at comparable rates to the Taiwan study. Data from the full set of 1000 patients who were screened is forthcoming. Still, it would take far more research to determine who in the US, if anyone, would benefit from broader screening and whether it could meaningfully reduce lung cancer deaths. Screening more people can lead to more false positives, which may mean patients get biopsies and other interventions they don't need. And some cancers doctors find are so slow growing that they may never cause harm, said Dr Natalie Lui, a thoracic surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. 'What if we're taking out all these tiny lung cancers that would not have been life-threatening?' Lui said. On the flip side, she thinks of the patients she regularly sees who have aggressive or advanced lung cancers but never smoked. 'If there was screening, we could save their life,' Lui said. The good news is that survival with advanced cancers has improved with newer therapies that effectively keep the disease at bay for years in many patients. Such treatments have benefited Leah Phillips, of Pewee Valley, Kentucky. Doctors first mistakenly diagnosed her with asthma and then anxiety. Later, they said she had pneumonia. When an oncologist finally told her in 2019 that she had metastatic lung cancer, he gave her six to 12 months to live. 'Go home and get your affairs in order,' Phillips remembered him saying. She was 43, and her children were 9, 13, and 14. 'I'm not leaving my kids,' Phillips thought. After getting a second opinion, she started taking a drug that targets one of the driver mutations in lung cancer. She prayed to make it to her eldest child's graduation. 'I cried through his entire senior year,' she said. In June, she watched her middle child graduate. 'Now I need to make it to the next one,' she said. Phillips, who co-founded a non-profit called the Young Lung Cancer Initiative to increase awareness of the condition, said people look at her askance when she tells them she has lung cancer but never smoked. They didn't know it was possible. It's not your grandfather's lung cancer anymore, she tells them. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Written by: Nina Agrawal and Allison Jiang Photographs by: Shuran Huang, Jon Cherry ©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Scoop
21-07-2025
- Scoop
Booze Warnings On Hold
, for The Detail Outdated alcohol guidelines put New Zealand out of step with modern research, but our health authorities are in no hurry to update them. In Canada, proposed guidelines for low-risk drinking set the weekly limit at two drinks. Here in New Zealand, the recommendation is to cap alcohol at 10 drinks weekly for women, and 15 for men, with two alcohol-free days per week. Despite these guidelines being nearly 15 years old, and documents from Health NZ showing that they consider a review of the guidelines to be 'necessary', for now, the guidelines are staying as they are. "The complication is that the Ministry of Health has come in over the top of [Health NZ] and has said 'actually these are our guidelines ... we want to control this and we're putting a pause on that work'," says RNZ's Guyon Espiner. "It certainly does show that they're listening to the alcohol industry, who are pretty exercised about this - because as you can imagine, this could have a significant effect on sales if people did take this advice and did drink significantly less." In a series of articles over the past few months, Espiner has reported on issues of alcohol harm and how the alcohol lobby has impacted policy in New Zealand. Through documents he received through the Official Information Act (OIA), he found that Health NZ commissioned a review of the low-risk guidelines. But in October 2024, a lobbyist emailed Ross Bell, who is a manager in the Ministry of Health's Public Health Agency, asking why Health NZ's website said the guidelines were under review. In December, following a second email which again asked about the review and also complained about mention of the Canadian guidelines on Health NZ-run website ' Bell emailed Health NZ saying "All work on this project will now pause. You will update relevant Health NZ websites to remove references to the review and also to other jurisdictions' guidelines (including the Canadian one)." But in a statement to The Detail, the Ministry of Health says it "understands Health New Zealand has continued some work related to the review. The Ministry is working with Health New Zealand on potential next steps, including how Health New Zealand's progress on the review to date can be used to inform any future work in this area" and that "the Ministry is currently considering where the next phase (Phase 2) will fit as it prioritises its work programme for 2025/26." The Ministry's statement, which is attributed to Dr Andrew Old, Deputy Director-General, Public Health Agency, goes on to say that "as part of good policy process, the Ministry engages with a broad range of interested parties-including community organisations, public health experts, and the industry-to ensure any regulatory approaches are well-informed and transparent. Reference to the drinking guidelines review was removed from the website to avoid confusion about roles and responsibilities as the guidelines are now led by the Ministry of Health - rather than Health New Zealand which has responsibility for the site. This was an internal Ministry decision." In today's episode of The Detail, Espiner details other examples of contact between the alcohol lobby and health policy makers. "The material I've got shows that yes they've had a lot of meetings, a lot of email contact, in fact one looked like a regular meeting between alcohol lobbyists and Ministry of Health staff. They've also shared with the alcohol industry their plans on how they will combat Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder ... they shared that entire draft document with them and also shared with them plans about how they might spend the alcohol levy." Espiner says that while this contact is going on, tobacco lobbyists are completely 'locked out of the policy process". "We're signatory to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, [which is] a World Health initiative, and there's a clause in there that New Zealand is signed up to that says you won't allow the vested interests of the tobacco industry to shape policy. "What's interesting is that the alcohol industry has escaped most of that scrutiny." For Massey University associate professor Andy Towers, who has worked on the Health NZ review, it is a clear mistake for New Zealand to allow lobbyists a role. "It's very, very clear that you don't invite the wolf into the henhouse," he says. "Unfortunately the alcohol industry makes money based on alcohol use and resulting alcohol harms and in a space where we are trying to reduce the harmful use of alcohol and reduce those harms for society and for communities, there is not space for the alcohol industry there. They do not get to sit at the table, just as you wouldn't invite an arms manufacturer to the table to talk about cessation of violence." In this episode of The Detail, Towers explains how knowledge around the harm of alcohol has evolved in the past 20 years, and where New Zealand sits on alcohol use compared to other countries. Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here.
Scoop
20-07-2025
- Scoop
Wētā Workshop Designed TCM Cultural Experience Center Opens In Guangdong China
From the lotus petal-shaped building to the larger-than-life hyper-realistic figures, magical forests, and a futuristic herbal laboratory — these are just some of the aspects of the new TCM Cultural Experience Center designed by Richard Taylor and his team at Wētā Workshop, working in close collaboration with Wellington and China-based creative practitioners and companies. This unique and striking center opened on Saturday 19 July at the Guangdong-Macao Traditional Chinese Medicine Science and Technology Industrial Park, China. The Guangdong-Macao Traditional Chinese Medicine Science and Technology Industrial Park features a mix of facilities, including offices, R&D centres, hotels, retail streets, an experience centre, pharmaceutical plants, testing and extraction centres, and staff apartments. As a core part of the park, the five-storey TCM Cultural Experience Center, with a floor area of 36,000 square metres, is the flagship of its health sector and a powerful symbol of cultural integration in the Greater Bay Area. This new TCM Cultural Experience Center offers a fully immersive experience that brings the culture of traditional Chinese medicine to life, guiding visitors on a journey from its mythological origins to the advancements in modern practices, and on into thefuture. This natural approach to medicine is a critically important part of Chinese wellbeing, and the TCM Cultural Experience Center aims to inspire future generations to learn about this important cultural practice. Taylor, alongside creative collaborator Sam Gao, worked over seven years to realise the project in close collaboration with client Hengxin Shambala. Wētā Workshop's Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, Richard Taylor, says, 'For me it was critical to approach the subject with a deep sense of commitment, and to learn all that I could of the mythology, history, science, and culture of this fascinating subject. By exploring the use of herbal medicine over centuries of Chinese wellbeing, a complex and intriguing story begins to unfold.' The TCM Cultural Experience Center is Wētā Workshop's largest project to date, and their second large-scale immersive experience project in China, following the completion of their award-winning work on Aura: The Forest at the Edge of the Sky at the duty-free shopping mall in Haikou, on Hainan Island in 2022. The TCM Cultural Experience Center is especially significant for Taylor and the team at Wētā Workshop, not only due to the size and scale of the project, but the extent to which the team researched and designed the experience, from the uniquely designed building itself, through to the cultural narratives within its spaces. Taylor adds, 'As I have spent close to three decades working in China, it came as an extraordinary treat to work so comprehensively on something as monumental as this experience. What started as a white board drawing in my office now stands as a magnificent structure containing an utterly unique cultural exhibition.' 'This was a very special project that is testament to the tight collaboration and creative exchange between two teams — one in New Zealand, and one in China — united by the collective endeavour of creating the world's most unique TCM Cultural Experience Center,' Taylor adds. Wētā Workshop's head of creative media, Sam Gao, worked closely with Taylor on both creative direction and hands-on sculpting elements and says, 'Despite the challenges of often having to work remotely, the project was immensely fulfilling and brought together people from China mainland and Macau, alongside our own Workshop team in New Zealand.' 'On a more personal level, it was an honour to share my creative expertise on a project that celebrates traditional Chinese medicine and brings to life stories from my cultural upbringing,' Gao adds. The TCM Cultural Experience Center experience starts before guests enter, with its unique building design paying homage to the herbal plants that are critical to traditional Chinese medicine. Within the building guests encounter a multitude of exhibits, including a large number of hyper-realistic up-scaled figures representing key moments from Chinese culture including Hua Tuo, Zhang Zhongjing and Li Shi Zhen. A 50-metrre-long animated 'historical tapestry' is just one of several features which skilfully combine artistry and interactive smart tech throughout the building. The stunning central atrium showcases the story of Shen Nong with a large-scale mural on the ceiling, with 100 birds flying down towards the ground floor, connecting all five levels of the building. Working alongside collaborator Sam Gao, Taylor and Gao strived to facilitate and connect two teams of creatives. Providing design and fabrication services from their base in Wellington, Wētā Workshop worked with New Zealand-based designers, musical composer, architects, and lighting designers to work alongside them during this unprecedented project. In collaboration with client Shambala, Taylor and Gao also art directed dozens of highly skilled Chinese creatives and technicians to complete the center. Taylor adds, 'This project is the cumulation of a near three-decade long relationship that I have had with China, and celebrates the strong creative exchange we have established with friends and colleagues in both countries.' The TCM Cultural Experience Center adds to Wētā Workshop's growing portfolio of immersive experiences work globally, with significant projects in New Zealand, China and the Middle East. About Wētā Workshop Wētā Workshop brings imaginary worlds to life by delivering concept design, physical effects, collectibles, immersive visitor experiences, creative media and digital games to the world's entertainment and creative industries. Established by Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger in 1987, they are best known for their screen work on The Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies, the Avatar films, District 9 and Dune to name a few. Their work in immersive visitor experiences, such as Gallipoli: The Scale of our War, Expo 2020 Dubai's Mobility Pavilion, Aura: Forest at the Edge of the Sky and Wētā Workshop Unleashed. Based in Wellington, New Zealand, Wētā Workshop's ground-breaking work has earned them multiple international awards including five Oscars and three THEA awards. About the TCM Cultural Experience Center The TCM Cultural Experience Center is the world's first large-scale TCM-focused experience that offers an immersive journey through an informative and visually unique experience. Designed by Richard Taylor, creative director, five-time Academy Award winner and co-founder of Wētā Workshop, the centre delivers a fantastical experience that celebrates in the culture, mythology, science and history of traditional Chinese medicine.
