Could stonefish have done this?

Zubaidah Nazeer, New Paper 28 Dec 07;

HER mouth swelled and her lips started to peel.

She saw the doctor eight times in a month to find out what happened.

Madam Lim now thinks it has something to do with a stonefish dish she had at a seafood restaurant on 24 Nov.

Stonefish have spikes containing venom and can cause intense pain when stepped on.

But experts say the venom is destroyed if the fish is cooked.

According to a Shin Min Daily News report yesterday, Madam Lim and her family had dinner at a seafood restaurant in Bukit Timah on 24 Nov.

The report did not name the restaurant.

Attempts by The New Paper to contact Madam Lim were unsuccessful.

Curious about the Hong Kong-style steamed stonefish dish, the 30-year-old housewife ordered it despite its hefty price tag of $105 per kilogram.

She told Shin Min: 'My husband didn't eat the fish and my four-year-old daughter ate only the tail portion.

'I was the one who ate almost the entire portion of the fish.'

She claimed her symptoms started as soon as she got home.

Her throat felt dry and itchy and her entire mouth started swelling, she said. The area around her mouth also started going numb.

She said: 'My throat felt so dry, it felt like it was splitting open. I had to drink water every 10 minutes or else it would have been unbearable.'

She dismissed it as an allergic reaction to seafood.

But after three days, she felt it could be more than that so she saw a doctor.

In all, she made eight trips to the doctor in one month, costing her $150.

NEED MORE TESTS

She said: 'The doctor told me he needed to do more tests to make sure it was indeed the toxins from the stonefish causing these reactions.'

Added Madam Lim: 'It was my first time eating stonefish. When I ordered it, I didn't know that these fish had toxins.'

Anyone handling the fish has to be trained and wear thick gloves when removing the venomous dorsal spines.

They are cut off with a pair of scissors before the fish is cooked.

Madam Lim could not remember if the fish still had spikes on its back.

In an earlier report, Singapore General Hospital's Dr Teoh Lam-Chuan, chief of the hand surgery department said: 'There are several worldwide studies done which found out that the venom can be destroyed by heat.'

Professor Chou Loke Ming from NUS biological sciences department said the stonefish is harmful only if the venom is injected into the body.

'Cooking the stonefish destroys its venom,' he said

An employee at one restaurant selling stonefish told The New Paper that the dish is usually steamed or cooked and served in a thick, milky herbal soup. The restaurant has been selling the dish for about five years.

Up to 10 stonefishes are consumed each month. He claims none of his workers or his customers have fallen ill from eating or touching the stonefish.

Despite this, the restaurant has stopped selling the fish for about a month now because supply has dried up.

A check with the supplier of the stonefish confirmed this.

Mr Simon Loh, who works at the Unique Seafood market - which supplies stonefish to three restaurants in the Turf City area and three restaurants outside of it - said his centre has not had stonefish delivered to it for more than a month now.

He also said no one had come forward to say they fell ill from eating stonefish.

The only case he remembered was of a worker who got stung a few years ago while handling the fish but his pain was relieved immediately as they injected him with anti-venom on standby.

In 2002, there were five reports of men being stung by stonefish in the waters off Sentosa, Changi beach and St John's Island.

In 2005, one such incident was reported.

Recently, on 3 Nov, a Chinese national stepped on a stonefish as he was wading in the waters at Sentosa.

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Wanton consumerism and saving ourselves

Save ourselves? Paradigm shift needed
Letter from Zhuang WenXiong, Straits Times Forum 27 Dec 07;

I REFER to Mr Eugene Tay Tse Chuan's letter, 'To save ourselves, we must get back to nature' (ST, Dec 25). Mr Tay mentions several pertinent points I would like to expound on.

Joseph Tainter, in his seminal book The Collapse Of Complex Societies, argues that capitalism is unsustainable as it requires both whole economies and individual components (for instance, companies) to grow constantly on a three-month basis, resulting in a philosophy of wanton consumerism which encourages the purchase of an increasing number of goods and services in order to sustain economic growth.

Current rates of resource extraction may not be capable of keeping up, especially with the nascent development of resource-hungry behemoths like China and India - witness the increasing inflationary pressures on food and oil prices worldwide. Competition for dwindling resources may even result in new outbreaks of war and civil strife.

This is notwithstanding flawed methods of measuring wealth, such as GNP, which do not take into account potential costs like pollution or climate change. This leads to the myopic fixation on short-term revenue that Mr Tay rightly points out.

In short, a fundamental paradigm shift, a drastic change to the foundations on which world society is built, will be required. A simple exhortation to 'return to nature' which does not take into account geopolitical realities and inherent resistance to change will not do the trick.

In the meantime, we as consumers can do our part by, for instance, supporting environment-friendly companies and reducing consumption of superfluous goods and services.

Help improve, not just sustain, our living environment
Letter from Goh Si Guim, Straits Times Forum 27 Dec 07;

I REFER to the letter, 'To save ourselves, we must get back to nature' by Mr Eugene Tay Tse Chuan.

I agree that exploitation of natural resources anywhere on the face of the planet is never benign nor a pretty sight. We have gone overboard in sustaining the existence of the human race.

Development of any kind is reformatting the natural appearance to our needs and liking. These activities involve rearranging components of nature into unnatural orientations and compositions. By doing so, we layer one thing over another; we destroy as we encroach.

A whole host of unquantifiable factors changed, the consequence of which cannot be readily ascertained. Past experiences intuitively tell us that they are not necessarily good. The only good derived from all these are that we have what we wanted. The other matters are cast aside, out of our mind and out of sight. Often, they are quickly forgotten.

At what point do we cross that line where the good we get out of what we do starts to diminish, to borrow a concept from economics. Going by emerging pictures, we have!

We do not have the option of back pedalling; going back to the Stone Age is not necessary. Putting back what we have taken out is not possible. Going forward through alternative means is the only viable option. We need to refocus and redirect our effort at 'diminishing our diminishing return'.

Put simply, improve the sustainability quotient of our living environment.

This should be the nature of our business from now on. Not only should the industries head in this direction, but the political leadership should also remodel itself to facilitate and complement. So should individuals.

The haggling in Kyoto and recently in Bali showed that there is a lack of collective leadership and willpower to making things better in our journey forward.

The human race has brought us into this conundrum and we have to find a way out of it. Nobody will be doing us that favour.

Read more!

What is the true value of Christmas gifts?

Rapt in the true value of Christmas gifts
Chua Mui Hoong, Straits Times 28 Dec 07;

THE Christmas presents have been unwrapped and politely gushed over.

Now it's time for some hard-headed analysis: Was it worth all that bother, buying and wrapping the presents and then giving them to people who may not really value them?

Hold the criticism. This isn't as churlish as it may sound.

In fact, there's a respectable sub-sub-sub-specialty in behavioural economics that analyses the economics of gift-giving in general, and Christmas presents in particular.

Academic Joel Waldfogel published a paper in 1993 on the 'deadweight loss' in Christmas gifts. In economic parlance, deadweight loss refers to the waste incurred in a transaction.

In the context of Christmas presents, it refers to the fact that you pay S$20 to buy a present that the giver probably doesn't really want, and which he would have paid just S$16 for. The S$4 difference is the deadweight loss, or wastage, involved in the gift exchange.

Mr Waldfogel conducted an unrepresentative informal survey of his students and collected data on 278 gifts. He found that most recipients valued their gifts at less than the market price, about 87 per cent.

From this, he attempted a tentative analysis suggesting the deadweight loss of Christmas gifts was a whopping US$4 billion (S$5.8 billion) to US$13 billion worth in the United States.

If one million gifts exchange hands in Singapore over Christmas, and each gift has a deadweight loss of S$4, that's S$4 million down the drain here as well.

And if that's the case, are we better off not giving Christmas presents?

Hold on, say other economists. There are flaws in Mr Waldfogel's analysis. Apart from his survey data not being representative, his analysis ignores the intangible sentimental value attached to gifts.

In a 1996 rebuttal of Mr Waldfogel's article, academics Sara Solnick and David Hemenway argued that 'a large literature, which Waldfogel did not discuss, indicates that a gift received is often far more valuable to the recipient than its market price'.

'For example, a gift may be something the recipient greatly values and had not known existed,' they said.

'Also, many items give recipients higher utility if they were purchased by someone else; due to self-management or other problems, an individual would not buy the item for herself but would gladly receive it as a gift.'

The writers added: 'Why did people value their gifts? Half of all respondents said the gift showed a lot of thought, half said the gift was something 'you wanted but felt you shouldn't spend money on for yourself', 22 per cent said the gift was something they needed but never remembered to get and 20 per cent said they would not have wanted to shop for the gift themselves.'

Many of us can vouch for the truth of those statements in our own lives.

I love receiving pretty, frivolous gifts - stuff I would not have bought for myself.

My favourite Christmas gift this year is a pair of lacey bra straps - yes, bra straps - adorned with pearls. It's something I would not have bought for myself, but when I opened the present after a lucky dip at a Christmas party, I was thrilled and knew it was what I had always secretly wanted. Well, sort of.

In my office, one colleague got a red G-string for her Christmas gift - another item she probably wouldn't have thought of getting for herself.

Then there are gifts which are really priceless because of the effort and thought that went into them: Hand-made jewellery, for example, or home-made cookies.

Can one place a value on such sentiments, you ask. Well, economists try.

One good old-fashioned way to do this is to ask recipients how much they would accept to give up their gifts. Often, the price will be a multiple of the market price of the item.

Economists have found from repeated experiments that people want more money to give up something than they would pay to get the same item.

For example, I may be prepared to pay just S$4 for those bra straps. But once they are given to me, I won't give them up for less than, say, S$10. This is called the 'endowment effect' and refers to the way we tend to place a higher value on things we already have. Think of how much you love your comfy pair of jeans.

When asked how much they thought a gift cost, and how much they would accept to give it up, Ms Solnick and Mr Hemenway found that often, recipients wanted twice as much to give up a gift.

In other words, the pleasure they get out of the gift has a monetary value equal to twice the market price.

From this, they concluded that 'most gifts created positive value'.

But wait, sceptics will say. What about the cost of the giver's time in selecting the presents and wrapping them? Factor in the cost of all this time and energy, and you may yet discover that gift-giving still represents a deadweight loss.

Rational-thinking people trained in economic theory know the best gift is cash. According to economic theory, cash gives you the freedom to decide what you want. It's a pure currency of exchange, devoid of sentiment, stripping giving of the hazards of second-guessing. It's the most efficient gift, eliminating deadweight loss.

But in polite society in the West, it's not the done thing to hand over wads of cash, unless it's from adult relations to minors, or from children to their parents.

In Chinese custom, however, there's an established tradition of cash-giving. Stuff those notes into little red envelopes and they become a perfectly acceptable gift for birthdays, weddings, special occasions.

Maybe the hongbao is the perfect solution to the purported deadweight loss of Christmas gift exchange. Trust the ancient Chinese to come up with a practical solution to an economic problem.

Happy New Year.

Read more!

How to get rid of unwanted Christmas gifts

What you can do with two turtle doves
Online markets help find new owners for unwanted gifts
The Daily Telegraph, Today Online 28 Dec 07;

The needles are falling off the pine tree, you have polished off the last few scraps of turkey and there is nothing but wall-to-wall ads for the holiday season and cut-price sofas on television. Proof, if it were needed, that Christmas is well and truly over.

Inevitably, for every snazzy game console and CD you have received, there are countless books, socks and bathroom potpourris that you do not need. But thanks to the Internet, you can sell your unwanted Christmas gifts online without too much difficulty — and, if you are lucky, you might even turn a profit.

One of the foremost online marketplaces is eBay, but there are alternatives to this auction behemoth and these can sometimes prove more fruitful if you are selling rare or niche items.

Try QXL, Tazbar or eBid. Most have user forums and you can often list your item for sale on them, so that you are targeting a niche audience, and it should guarantee you a good price for your item. Amazon has also entered the online auction arena, at Amazon.co.uk/auctions and through the Amazon Marketplace.

If the thought of selling your unwanted gifts for profit seems a step too far, you can take the ethical route and exchange them or give them away through Freecycle or donate them to the charity shop.

There are even sites that will let you swap your unwanted gifts for things you want. Hitflip, for example, allows you to build a virtual library of all the DVDs, games, CDs and books you are prepared to swap, and charges about 79 pence ($2.30) per item.

eBay remains the marketplace of choice for most people and it is not hard to see why. It has more than 200 million members around the world and if you cannot find someone who wants to buy your toast rack in the shape of Thomas the Tank Engine on this site, you probably never will.

The secret of successful selling on eBay is to create a listing for your item that will attract potential buyers. This means using the right keywords and the appropriate categories to give your unwanted goods the best chance of being found.

Think carefully about what category to put your item into — this is easy for most things, such as books and CDs, but that toast rack is a bit trickier.

Search the site for similar items to see how they have been labelled. On most sites, you can list your item in multiple categories but this often bumps up the cost of listing the goods.

It is probably worth doing if you are trying to sell something obscure but not for everyday goods.

The item description is perhaps the most important aspect of selling online, so write it as though you will not be accompanying the item with a picture, says eBay expert Dan Wilson.

According to Mr Wilson, old hands at selling on eBay swear timing is a key to success, making sure that their auctions end on Thursday and Sunday evenings, when eBay is at its busiest.

When it comes to setting a price for your item, be realistic. Look around the site to see what the going rate is for similar items.

If you are auctioning unwanted Christmas gifts and the site allows you to set the starting bid price, kick things off at the lowest fee you are willing to take for that item. Ensure you have taken into account postage and administrative fees.

Of course, all your hard work will be wasted if you end up being conned by your buyer. Never accept payments in foreign cheques or other currencies, or methods you have not used before yourself.

PayPal is an excellent way to do business, as your buyer can send you payment instantly via this website without having to disclose their credit card details to you personally, and you can be certain that the money has been received before dispatching the goods.

PayPal charges a small fee for this service, but you cannot put a price on the ease of use and peace of mind it gives you.

So, gather all those novelty jumpers, bad compilation CDs and duplicate computer games and donate them to charity or put them up for sale online. You will start the new year with a clean slate and some change in your pocket.

Read more!

Christmas gifts graveyard in China

Chinese town where old presents go to die
Richard Spencer, Telegraph 27 Dec 07;

The Chinese town of Guiyu is the graveyard of Christmas past.

It is where presents - game consoles, laptops, mobile phones - come to die.

It is also where they are reborn. In this giant scrap-yard, so dangerously polluted that its children are being clinically poisoned, the electronic objects of desire, a million tons of them a year, are broken apart, melted down, and washed in acid to be recycled into a new flood of imports for Christmas future.

Now the British Environmental Agency says that despite a ban on exports of electronic waste to China, unscrupulous middle men are using a loophole in the law intended to encourage recycling to dump more goods in places like Guiyu, where labour costs are low and environmental controls weak.

E-waste is delivered to "civic amenity sites", which can sell it on for recycling at home.

"Operators are visited by what we would call waste tourists," said John Burns, the Environmental Agency enforcement manager.

"They will buy in bulk and ship it abroad ostensibly as second-hand goods for resale but in fact for breaking up."

The effects, particularly of breaking up circuit boards, are clear within minutes of arriving in Guiyu, a town five hours' drive north-east of Hong Kong.

The smell of scorched metal and burned plastic hangs over the town.
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The source is immediately obvious. Inside and outside the shack-like workshops that line the streets, men and women sit burning circuit boards over coal fires. Wang Qing, a 39-year-old mother of two, sits for 10 or 12 hours a day, 30 days a month, over the flame, melting the solder that sticks the electronic components to the circuit boards.

With a knife, she scrapes them into baskets on one side and dumps the singed boards on the other. A thick cloud of toxic smoke envelopes her face.

"I get head-aches all the time, and suffer a lot of colds," she said. She said she didn't like to wear face-masks and her boss did not insist.

Her wages drew her a thousand miles from her home in central China. She earns about £100 a month, a decent salary in China. In other workshops, many family-run, children help out during their lunch breaks and holidays.

In the streets, piles of scrap mount up, while effluent fills the black streams that criss-cross the town and in which residents still rely for daily tasks such as washing. Much of this comes from the acid baths in which components are washed either to remove surplus metal, or to break them down further.

The price of metals found in the components, including gold and copper, has risen hugely in recent years, meaning good profits can be had from extracting them.

But according to local academics, the families, while making money, are also paying a frightening price. A study at nearby Shantou University found that of 165 children aged between one and six in Guiyu, 135 - 82 per cent - had clinical lead poisoning, which can cause brain damage.

The problem is not new. The Daily Telegraph first visited Guiyu seven years ago, and since then the European Union has banned exports of E-waste.

But alongside the familiar brand-names, such as ATI and Intel, The Daily Telegraph found evidence of the continuing trade, which is also supposed to be banned by China itself.

Labels showed bundles had been sent from EU countries such as Austria as well as from America, where, despite campaigns, the trade is still legal.

Hong Kong's environmental protection department said that the city had so far this year stopped 116 container loads of electronic waste being illegally imported, up from 70 all last year, though none was from Britain.

That does not mean the trade is not happening. Britain prosecuted two companies this year caught trying to export electric waste illegally. One was fined just £3,000, another £9,000.

Guiyu is not China's only recycling city. Further south is Panyu, which specialises in plastic bags.

Further north is Taizhou, which takes plastic bottles, and melts them down into pellets.

And Guiyu has branched out into other products too. Outside one warehouse were piles of bits of cars. "We specialise in Audis and Land Rover," the owner said.

Even the biggest Christmas presents end up in Guiyu.

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WHO confirms human-to-human birdflu case in Pakistan

Yahoo News 27 Dec 07;

The World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed on Thursday a single case of human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 bird flu virus in a family in Pakistan but said there was no apparent risk of it spreading wider.

A statement from the U.N. agency said tests in its special laboratories in Cairo and London had established the "human infection" through presence of the virus "collected from one case in an affected family."

But it said a WHO team invited to Pakistan to look into an outbreak involving up to nine people, from late October to December 6 had found no evidence of sustained or community human-to-human transmission.

No identified close contacts of the people infected, including health workers and other members of the affected family, had shown any symptoms and they had all been removed from medical observation, the WHO added.

The outbreak followed a culling of infected chickens in the Peshawar region, in which a veterinary doctor was involved. Subsequently he and three of his brothers developed proven or suspected pneumonia.

The brothers cared for one another and had close personal contact both at home and in the hospital, a WHO spokesman in Geneva said. One of them, who was not involved in the culling, died on November 23.

His was the human-to-human transmission case confirmed by the WHO. The others all recovered.

"All the evidence suggests that the outbreak within this family does not pose a broader risk," the WHO spokesman told Reuters. "But there is already heightened surveillance and there is a need for ongoing vigilance."

It was the first human-to-human case of H5N1 transmission in Pakistan, while others have been confirmed in Indonesia and Thailand in similar circumstances of what the WHO calls close contacts in a very circumscribed area.

Global health experts fear the virus -- which has killed 211 people out of 343 infections reported since 2003 -- could mutate into a form that spreads easily from one person to another, possibly triggering a pandemic that could kill millions.

(Writing by Robert Evans)

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2007 natural catastrophes more frequent and costlier

Natural catastrophes will grow with climate change: re-insurer
Yahoo News 27 Dec 07;

Natural catastrophes in 2007 were more frequent and costlier than a year earlier and climate change will make them more expensive still, the world's second-biggest re-insurer, Munich Re, said Thursday.

There were 950 natural catastrophes in 2007 compared with 850 in 2006, the highest number since the group started compiling its closely watched annual report in 1974.

The total cost of disasters in 2007 was 75 billion dollars (51.5 billion euros), while the bill for 2006 was 50 billion dollars.

The 2007 figure was however far below the record figure of 220 billion dollars in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina and a earthquake in Pakistan caused devastation.

The most damaging event of 2007 was an earthquake in Japan in July which caused 12.5 billion dollars of damage, while insurers took the biggest hit from the Kyrill storm which ripped through Europe in January, costing 5.8 billion dollars.

Catastrophes in developing and emerging countries caused most of the 20,000 deaths in 2007, with 3,300 people losing their lives in Cyclone Sidr alone, which struck Bangladesh in November.

Floods in Britain were the second costliest event to insurers and Munich Re said the high incidence of floods and storms in 2007 was a sign of things to come if global warming continued unchecked.

"These events cannot, of course, be attributed solely to climate change, but they are in line with the pattern that we can expect in the long term: severe storms, more heavy rainfall and a greater tendency towards flooding," said Peter Hoeppe, head of the company's Re's Geo Risks Research Department.

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Three years on from the Boxing Day tsunami, have the countries recovered?

Kathy Marks, The Independent 26 Dec 07;

Why are we asking this now?

Three years ago today, a massive underwater earthquake off the Indonesian island of Sumatra triggered a series of monster tidal waves that flattened coastal communities around the Indian Ocean and left nearly a quarter of a million people dead. More than a dozen countries suffered damage and casualties, with two million people displaced and entire towns and villages wiped out in the worst-affected nations of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand. It was the most crippling natural disaster of modern times, and it prompted an unprecedented outpouring of generosity, with governments and aid organisations pledging $13.6bn (nearly £7bn).

Is the recovery and reconstruction effort complete?

Great strides have been made since the early days, when the focus was on delivering emergency food, shelter and health care to survivors. In Indonesia's Aceh province, the most devastated region, more than 100,000 homes have been rebuilt, together with 800 schools, 600 hospitals and clinics, 17 sea ports, 10 airstrips, 216 bridges and 1,240 miles of roads. Reconstruction on a similar scale has taken place in Sri Lanka, with the regeneration of the southern district of Galle symbolised by this month's Test match between England and the host country, played in a once-picturesque cricket stadium wrecked by the tsunami and now restored to something of its former glory. In southern Thailand, the beach resorts that were levelled have been rebuilt, and in the case of Khao Lak, where corpses littered the golden sands following the tsunami, are enjoying 80 per cent occupancy rates.

So everyone has a roof over their heads?

While hundreds of thousands of survivors have been rehoused, many others are still living in makeshift shelters, either because of delays in providing them with new homes, or because they are reluctant to move away from the sea. Others cannot afford to buy land, even with state assistance. In India, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, there have been complaints about shoddy housing that was put up in a hurry and is already falling apart; meanwhile, some newly settled areas have yet to be supplied with roads, water, electricity and sanitation. As a result, significant numbers of new houses remain empty. In Sri Lanka, the government reportedly used threats and blackmail to force survivors to leave temporary camps, so that it could claim that everyone had been resettled by the third anniversary.

How are peoplemanaging to live?

After rehousing, the next priority was to help survivors regain their livelihoods, and to rebuild local economies. Many of those stricken were fishermen, whose boats were destroyed, and farmers, who saw their paddy fields poisoned. Charities such as World Vision distributed fishing boats, nets and engines, water pumps, computers, diving kits, sewing machines, food processors and carpentry equipment. In Thailand, Caritas provided small loans to people seeking to rebuild their businesses. In Aceh, where more than 40 per cent of locals lost their livelihoods, Tearfund, a British development agency, assisted chilli farmers in reclaiming salt-contaminated land through the use of organic pesticides. On Aceh's west coast, at Lhongka, a seaside cement factory destroyed by the tidal waves is being rebuilt with the help of Chinese engineers and funds from a French company.

Has all the aid reached its destination?

With such large sums of money sloshing around, some feared the worst. On the whole, those fears have not been realised, but inevitably there have been claims of financial irregularities. In the province of Aceh, where projects worth $2.54m have been questioned by an anti-corruption watchdog, officials admit that managing the total $4.6bn of aid donated has been a challenge in a nation where graft is endemic.

In Sri Lanka, a local newspaper reported last weekend that the country had received only $1.7bn of the $3.1bn pledged by foreign donors. In the UK, managers of the Millennium Stadium were forced to apologise last week after it emerged that £100,000 which was raised at a Tsunami Relief concert held in January 2005 had only just been paid out, nearly three years after the event.

Has the tsunami had a silver lining?

The tsunami was a human tragedy on a scale that remains difficult to comprehend, with 170,000 people killed in Aceh, 35,000 in Sri Lanka, 16,000 in India and 9,000 in Thailand. Yet it had some positive side-effects. In Aceh, it provided the impetus for a peace deal that ended decades of fighting between the Indonesian government forces and separatist rebels. The province now has a four-lane highway, rather than a two-lane coast road. Many survivors live in better homes than the ones they lost, and thanks to the focus on their communities, economic opportunities have improved. A World Vision agricultural project in Aceh has produced 2.5 times more yield than before the land was inundated. In Thailand, women who used to toil in rubber plantations have formed batik-making businesses with the help of the same charity, while Indian fishermen are using GPS (Global Positioning System).

Is the region nowbetter able to deal with another tsunami?

Improving warning systems in the region was crucial, not least because seismologists believe another giant earthquake could strike off Sumatra island in the near future. Public awareness has increased; when the ground shakes in Indonesia, as it often does in the quake-prone country, people now head for the hills. Throughout the region, education programmes have been conducted, and mangroves have been planted to create a natural buffer zone. And thanks to a project overseen by the UN organisation Unesco, the bones of a tsunami alert system for the Indian Ocean – consisting of 25 seismographic stations relaying information to 26 national warning centres – have been put in place. Thailand has installed 79 warning towers in coastal provinces and launched a US-funded deep-sea buoy to detect tidal waves, while Indonesia plans to install 23 buoys by the end of 2008. But experts warn that more co-ordination is needed between the nations in question if the system is to be effective.

What challenges remain for countries still recovering?

The rebuilding effort in Sri Lanka has been hampered by the civil war, which reignited two years ago; aid agencies say tsunami survivors in the north and east of the country are not receiving the help they need, thanks to security problems. Last week, a local Red Cross worker who received an award for his work during the tsunami was murdered by Tamil rebels. In Indonesia, the grinding pace of bureaucracy has hindered the reconstruction programme; the head of the programme had to ask Australia to fly his team to Aceh because his own government refused to pay for their flights. The World Bank has warned that Aceh faces an economic slump when the major work ends there in 2009 and aid agencies, which employ local labour, depart. Most challenging of all is the psychological and emotional legacy of the disaster, which left so many bereaved and bereft. The scars will never fully heal.

So are the communities affected by the tsunami back on their feet?

Yes...

* Housing and infrastructure programmes are progressingon schedule

* Most people have a livelihood, as well as access toessential services

* Local residents are much more aware of the dangers posedby the sea

No...

* An aid-fuelled economy has given an artificial sense ofprosperity and will collapse once relief organisations leave

* People remain traumatised by the tsunami, and are seized by panic whenever the earth shakes

* It will be years before physical reconstruction is complete,and even longer before the grief of survivors subsides

Read more!

Coral mining made tsunami more destructive in Sri Lanka

Earthtime.org 26 Dec 07;

Colombo, Dec 26 - The destruction wrought by the tsunami of Dec 25, 2004 on the southwestern coast of Sri Lanka would have been much less if successive governments had heeded Sir Arthur Clarke's persistent call to stop the mining of corals.

The British-born science writer and diving enthusiast, who had been living in Sri Lanka since 1956, was campaigning for coral reef protection and other matters relating to coastal preservation for long. But few in the island listened.

'He did create an awareness at the international level, but the message never percolated to the local level here in Sri Lanka,' said Vinod Moonesinghe, an environmental activist who had worked with the NGO 'Friends of the Earth.'

'The coral reefs from Akurela to Hikkaduwa were being mined for years to make lime which is used in the construction of buildings. The area had, in fact, become very famous for its lime. But the depletion of the corals had resulted in the killer waves lashing the shore with an unprecedented ferocity,' Moonesinghe told IANS on the third anniversary of the deadly tsunami..

In a place called Peraliya, 96 km south of Colombo, 1,500 people were killed in a matter of minutes, when the railway train in which they were traveling was struck by giant waves twice in quick succession. Peraliya town too lost heavily, with 2,500 dead and 450 families rendered homeless.

The battered, dented and rusted train quickly became a major tourist attraction, being the last vestige of the tsunami in the area, and the grimmest reminder of it.

'The corals in the 'coral garden' at Hikkaduwa and Akurela have survived the fury as they are better able to stand the waves than the species on land. And they continue to be a tourist attraction,' Moonesinghe said.

'The authorities must stop not only the mining of corals, as a matter of great urgency, but control the discharge of effluents from the beach hotels, that dot the coast,' he said.

The palm fringed coastline from Colombo to Galle has been a major tourist attraction, especially for Westerners looking for sun and sand. The place bristles with small and large lodges and hotels, several of them right on the shoreline.

Tsunami had induced some awareness of coastal management. The government had introduced a rule that there should be no construction within hundred metres of the shoreline. But the conservation measures are being implemented in a very 'desultory' manner, says Moonesinghe..

Over the years, the sea has eroded the southwestern coast greatly, and beaches are becoming scarce all along the Colombo-Galle road. In many places, the shoreline is barely a few yards away from the main road and rail line. And it is feared that due to global warming, erosion will only increase in the years to come, hitting tourism, which is already declining due to the war and the terrorist bombings.

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Best of our wild blogs: 27 Dec 07

Hornbill at Sentosa
on the bird ecology blog

Chek Jawa Transect Day 2
more encounters on this working trip
on the cj project blog and discovery blog

Another natural Christmas outing
full of slugs and corals at Semakau on the discovery blog and urban forest blog and nature scouters blog

Sweet young things on Changi
tiny baby creatures on the wildfilms blog

Ancestral trees in Sarawak
tradition to cherish trees on the garden voices blog

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Singapore young volunteers prefer to overseas charity

Charity begins at home - literally
Murali Sharma, Straits Times Forum 27 Dec 07;

I REFER to the report, 'Volunteer at home? No thanks!' (ST, Dec 23). It is a pity, though not surprising, that some young people prefer to go overseas to do charity work than help in Singapore. They claim they interact with people of different cultures and volunteering at home is more demanding.

I wonder if these people crave excitement and glamour that derive from talking about serving overseas, having been to other countries and building schools, rather than making a difference at home. A superiority syndrome where one can go to a poor country and then hold forth about one's contribution there may also be a magnet. Furthermore, overseas stints are more newsworthy.

In a local 'home', the duties may include cleaning drains and windows, sweeping, mopping, cooking, washing up, bathing and cleaning residents, washing soiled clothing and so on. How unexciting, even disgusting!

Compared to this, overseas stints may be termed 'white-collar' jobs, like teaching, playing with children, helping a medical team, erecting a building and so on. No doubt they may have to live in rough conditions sometimes but that in itself sounds more prestigious than telling friends: 'Oh, I go to an old folks' home in Choa Chu Kang every Saturday and feed some toothless old people and talk to them.'

But there is much to be done here in Singapore. Here too, one can get exposure to different cultures. Many people who mix only in narrow one-race circles will find local service exhilarating, educational and an eye-opener. When they find there are poor and lonely people in rich Singapore, it will make them think how they can help Singapore become a better place. They should not miss this wonderful opportunity to become more responsible and loving towards their fellow citizens.

I agree that helping at a home in Singapore is a long-term commitment. But it need not be a weekly commitment. Many homes will accept if a group will go there once a fortnight or even once a month. Other groups can serve on other weekends.

Schools too may be guilty of promoting overseas service projects enthusiastically. It makes for a good report in the annual magazine. I wonder how many schools have weekly or monthly service projects in Singapore. Overseas projects may sound grander and more glamorous than local ones, but there is a need here, even in rich Singapore.

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More Singapore car owners switch to CNG

More drivers making the switch to GAS
High petrol prices, green rebate help steer over 400 to compressed natural gas-powered vehicles
Christopher Tan, Straits Times 27 Dec 07;

STEP on the gas. More motorists are choosing to do exactly that these days.

More than 220 have had their cars converted to run on both compressed natural gas (CNG) and petrol. About 200 more have bought manufacturer-assembled petrol-CNG passenger cars, also called 'bi-fuel' cars.

Out to save the earth and save some money too, they say high petrol prices plus a generous green tax rebate helped them make the switch.

The trend started late last year, when passenger cars were allowed to be fitted to run on CNG as well as petrol.

Most conversions were done initially by German company

C Melchers GmBH and local firm Scantruck Engineering, both of which started conversions in earnest late last year at their respective workshops in Sungei Kadut and Tuas.

Two other firms have started offering the service - parallel importer Mova Automotive and Thai company SO NGV.

Most of the directly imported bi-fuel cars are Mercedes-Benzes.

Converting a car costs from around $3,000 and involves installing a gas tank, pipings to the engine, and a refuelling intake.

But customers usually recoup their outlay within two years as CNG retails at around 78 cents an equivalent litre. Petrol goes for about $1.90 a litre.

Product manager Lim Sim Leng, 45, owner of a converted Mercedes-Benz Vito van, readily attests to this.

'A tank of CNG costs me $11, and will give me 190 to 200km. Using petrol for the same distance, I would have to spend at least double that,' he said.

A petrol-electric hybrid car like the Toyota Prius would chalk up about 8.4 cents per km, compared with 7 cents for a car running on CNG and 18 cents for a conventional petrol car.

Information technology manager Adrian Koh, 34, noticed a slight power loss in his Chevrolet Optra after it was converted. 'But I don't mind since I don't drive like a race car driver,' he said.

Project manager Ang Kwang Wee, 46, was impressed by his savings. 'I never knew the mileage was so good. I travelled 2,350km last month and my total fuel spending was $227.

'If I had used only petrol, I would have spent over $440.'

He is happy his Toyota Picnic is able to accommodate the gas tank beneath the floor of the boot - which means the car still has decent boot space left.

A big incentive for conversion is the green tax break. New cars which can run on CNG are accorded a rebate equivalent to 40 percentage points of their additional registration fee.

In the case of a car like the Porsche Cayman - which businessman W.K. Chin, 38, is converting - it could work out to a saving of around $30,000 on the purchase price.

It was curiosity which led him to choose gas. 'I wanted to try something new,' he said. He found out about CNG conversions just as he was about to buy his Porsche.

This particular conversion - undertaken by Scantruck - is taking a little longer than usual because the authorities wanted to make sure the gas tank had a capacity of at least 50 litres - to ensure that owners are serious about their 'green' intentions.

To comply, Mr Chin's Porsche had to be installed with two carbon-fibre gas tanks, as a single large steel tank cannot be fitted without a huge weight penalty.

Mr Gilbert von der Aue, sales manager at Melchers, said he expects demand for conversion to go up when gas-refuelling facilities at Singapore Petroleum Company's Jalan Buroh station opens in the new year and Smart Energy's station in Mandai opens in February.

Currently, there is only one CNG kiosk: on Jurong Island.

'With current petrol prices, we expect demand for conversion to be high,' he said.

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