A record from Wanxiang Cave, China, characterizes Asian Monsoon (AM) history over the past 1810 years. The summer monsoon correlates with solar variability, Northern Hemisphere and Chinese temperature, Alpine glacial retreat, and Chinese cultural changes. It was generally strong during Europe's Medieval Warm Period and weak during Europe's Little Ice Age, as well as during the final decades of the Tang, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties, all times that were characterized by popular unrest. It was strong during the first several decades of the Northern Song Dynasty, a period of increased rice cultivation and dramatic population increase. The sign of the correlation between the AM and temperature switches around 1960, suggesting that anthropogenic forcing superseded natural forcing as the major driver of AM changes in the late 20th century.
Large amounts of new data on the natural history and treatment of chronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection have become available since 2005. These include long-term follow-up studies in large community-based cohorts or asymptomatic subjects with chronic HBV infection, further studies on the role of HBV genotype/naturally occurring HBV mutations, treatment of drug resistance and new therapies. In addition, Pegylated interferon α2a, entecavir and telbivudine have been approved globally. To update HBV management guidelines, relevant new data were reviewed and assessed by experts from the region, and the significance of the reported findings were discussed and debated. The earlier “Asian-Pacific consensus statement on the management of chronic hepatitis B” was revised accordingly. The key terms used in the statement were also defined. The new guidelines include general management, special indications for liver biopsy in patients with persistently normal alanine aminotransferase, time to start or stop drug therapy, choice of drug to initiate therapy, when and how to monitor the patients during and after stopping drug therapy. Recommendations on the therapy of patients in special circumstances, including women in childbearing age, patients with antiviral drug resistance, concurrent viral infection, hepatic decompensation, patients receiving immune-suppressive medications or chemotherapy and patients in the setting of liver transplantation, are also included.
Andrew D. Haddow, A. Schuh, Chadwick Y. Yasuda
et al.
Background Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-borne flavivirus distributed throughout much of Africa and Asia. Infection with the virus may cause acute febrile illness that clinically resembles dengue fever. A recent study indicated the existence of three geographically distinct viral lineages; however this analysis utilized only a single viral gene. Although ZIKV has been known to circulate in both Africa and Asia since at least the 1950s, little is known about the genetic relationships between geographically distinct virus strains. Moreover, the geographic origin of the strains responsible for the epidemic that occurred on Yap Island, Federated States of Micronesia in 2007, and a 2010 pediatric case in Cambodia, has not been determined. Methodology/Principal Findings To elucidate the genetic relationships of geographically distinct ZIKV strains and the origin of the strains responsible for the 2007 outbreak on Yap Island and a 2010 Cambodian pediatric case of ZIKV infection, the nucleotide sequences of the open reading frame of five isolates from Cambodia, Malaysia, Nigeria, Uganda, and Senegal collected between 1947 and 2010 were determined. Phylogenetic analyses of these and previously published ZIKV sequences revealed the existence of two main virus lineages (African and Asian) and that the strain responsible for the Yap epidemic and the Cambodian case most likely originated in Southeast Asia. Examination of the nucleotide and amino acid sequence alignments revealed the loss of a potential glycosylation site in some of the virus strains, which may correlate with the passage history of the virus. Conclusions/Significance The basal position of the ZIKV strain isolated in Malaysia in 1966 suggests that the recent outbreak in Micronesia was initiated by a strain from Southeast Asia. Because ZIKV infection in humans produces an illness clinically similar to dengue fever and many other tropical infectious diseases, it is likely greatly misdiagnosed and underreported.
There is a lack of high-quality evidence based on the gold standard of oral food challenges to determine food allergy prevalence. Nevertheless, studies using surrogate measures of food allergy, such as health service utilization and clinical history, together with allergen-specific immunoglobulin E (sIgE), provide compelling data that the prevalence of food allergy is increasing in both Western and developing countries. In Western countries, challenge-diagnosed food allergy has been reported to be as high as 10%, with the greatest prevalence noted among younger children. There is also growing evidence of increasing prevalence in developing countries, with rates of challenge-diagnosed food allergy in China and Africa reported to be similar to that in Western countries. An interesting observation is that children of East Asian or African descent born in a Western environment are at higher risk of food allergy compared to Caucasian children; this intriguing finding emphasizes the importance of genome-environment interactions and forecasts future increases in food allergy in Asia and Africa as economic growth continues in these regions. While cow’s milk and egg allergy are two of the most common food allergies in most countries, diverse patterns of food allergy can be observed in individual geographic regions determined by each country’s feeding patterns. More robust studies investigating food allergy prevalence, particularly in Asia and the developing world, are necessary to understand the extent of the food allergy problem and identify preventive strategies to cope with the potential increase in these regions.
Ancient migrations in Southeast Asia The past movements and peopling of Southeast Asia have been poorly represented in ancient DNA studies (see the Perspective by Bellwood). Lipson et al. generated sequences from people inhabiting Southeast Asia from about 1700 to 4100 years ago. Screening of more than a hundred individuals from five sites yielded ancient DNA from 18 individuals. Comparisons with present-day populations suggest two waves of mixing between resident populations. The first mix was between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers associated with the Neolithic spreading from South China. A second event resulted in an additional pulse of genetic material from China to Southeast Asia associated with a Bronze Age migration. McColl et al. sequenced 26 ancient genomes from Southeast Asia and Japan spanning from the late Neolithic to the Iron Age. They found that present-day populations are the result of mixing among four ancient populations, including multiple waves of genetic material from more northern East Asian populations. Science, this issue p. 92, p. 88; see also p. 31 Ancient DNA data shed light on the past 4000 years of Southeast Asian genetic history. Southeast Asia is home to rich human genetic and linguistic diversity, but the details of past population movements in the region are not well known. Here, we report genome-wide ancient DNA data from 18 Southeast Asian individuals spanning from the Neolithic period through the Iron Age (4100 to 1700 years ago). Early farmers from Man Bac in Vietnam exhibit a mixture of East Asian (southern Chinese agriculturalist) and deeply diverged eastern Eurasian (hunter-gatherer) ancestry characteristic of Austroasiatic speakers, with similar ancestry as far south as Indonesia providing evidence for an expansive initial spread of Austroasiatic languages. By the Bronze Age, in a parallel pattern to Europe, sites in Vietnam and Myanmar show close connections to present-day majority groups, reflecting substantial additional influxes of migrants.
Countless books and essays have been written on Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, and his achievements. He is regarded as one of the founding fathers of Independent India alongside M. K. Gandhi, Abul Kalam Azad and B. R. Ambedkar. Many books and essays have also been written on his family, often called India’s first family. The Nehrus had to leave their property and livelihood, had to spend months and years in jail and had to suffer at the hands of colonisers; yet, their determination remained unshakeable. Even after independence, both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi kept on working for the nation till their last breath. It was this sincerity that prompted historian Mushirul Hasan to pen this book. Here, I analyse the book in the light of various scholarly works around the themes of family history, the freedom struggle, composite nationalism and pluralism. I broadly examine the legacy of the Nehru family and their idea of India with reference to three main values—economic equality, gender equality and religious pluralism.
Anti-Asian discrimination and assaults have increased significantly during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, contributing to a "secondary contagion" of racism. The United States has a long and well-documented history of both interpersonal and structural anti-Asian discrimination, and the current pandemic reinforces longstanding negative stereotypes of this rapidly growing minority group as the "Yellow Peril."We provide a general overview of the history of anti-Asian discrimination in the United States, review theoretical and empirical associations between discrimination and health, and describe the associated public health implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing relevant evidence from previous disasters in US history that became racialized.Although the literature suggests that COVID-19 will likely have significant negative effects on the health of Asian Americans and other vulnerable groups, there are reasons for optimism as well. These include the emergence of mechanisms for reporting and tracking incidents of racial bias, increased awareness of racism's insidious harms and subsequent civic and political engagement by the Asian American community, and further research into resilience-promoting factors that can reduce the negative health effects of racism. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print September 17, 2020: e1-e4. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305858).
Over the past five years humanitarian ties between Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries have shown a rapid forced “cooling” due to numerous local and global restrictions during the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020–2021, and a gradual recovery in the post-COVID era. Against the backdrop of the recovery of countries after the pandemic, other constraints have emerged, primarily of a military and political nature, which “freeze” the further development of humanitarian ties. Since February 24, 2022, such a constraint in Russian-Japanese relations has been Russia's special military operation, which led to a global split between supporters and opponents of Ukraine. Nevertheless, Japan strives to establish and develop relations with the Asia-Pacific countries, which resulted, in particular, in a new record of foreign tourists visiting Japan in 2024. The situation in Russian-Japanese relations has seriously worsened, due to the actual development of sanctions and information war between the two countries. However, humanitarian ties between Russia and Japan have not ceased yet.
South Asia. Southeast Asia. East Asia, Bibliography. Library science. Information resources
The Asian American health narrative reflects a long history of structural racism in the US and the complex interplay of racialized history, immigrant patterns, and policies regarding Asians in the US. Yet owing to systematic issues in data collection including missing or misclassified data for Asian Americans and practices that lead to indiscriminate grouping of unlike individuals (for example, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Bangladeshi) together in data systems and pervasive stereotypes of Asian Americans, the drivers and experiences of health disparities experienced by these diverse groups remain unclear. The perpetual exclusion and misrepresentation of Asian American experiences in health research is exacerbated by three racialized stereotypes-the model minority, healthy immigrant effect, and perpetual foreigner-that fuel scientific and societal perceptions that Asian Americans do not experience health disparities. This codifies racist biases against the Asian American population in a mutually reinforcing cycle. In this article we describe the poor-quality data infrastructure and biases on the part of researchers and public health professionals, and we highlight examples from the health disparities literature. We provide recommendations on how to implement systems-level change and educational reform to infuse racial equity in future policy and practice for Asian American communities.
This article presents the stories of women who became victims of the multidimensional impact of the Partition of India in 1947. It steers through the autobiographic and fictional representations that emerged from their lives. The article argues that in the historical fabric, the socio-economic and political threads of time are so closely interwoven that it is almost impossible to study them in isolation.
Electronic health records include information on patients' status and medical history, which could cover the history of diseases and disorders that could be hereditary. One important use of family history information is in precision health, where the goal is to keep the population healthy with preventative measures. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques can assist with identifying information that could assist health professionals in identifying health risks before a condition is developed in their later years, saving lives and reducing healthcare costs. We survey the literature on the techniques from the NLP field that have been developed to utilise digital health records to identify risks of familial diseases. We highlight that rule-based methods are heavily investigated and are still actively used for family history extraction. Still, more recent efforts have been put into building neural models based on large-scale pre-trained language models. In addition to the areas where NLP has successfully been utilised, we also identify the areas where more research is needed to unlock the value of patients' records regarding data collection, task formulation and downstream applications.
The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger was a major event in the history of the Milky Way. Studies on Milky Way satellite dwarf galaxies show that key elemental abundance patterns, which probe different nucleosynthetic channels, reflect the host galaxy's star formation history. We gather Mg, Fe, Ba, and Eu abundance measurements for Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus stars from the SAGA database and use [Fe/Mg], [Ba/Mg], [Eu/Mg], and [Eu/Ba], as a function of [Fe/H] to constrain the star formation history of Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus. We use the known star formation histories and elemental abundance patterns of the Sculptor and Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxies as comparison. The elemental abundance ratios of [Fe/Mg], [Ba/Mg], [Eu/Mg], and [Eu/Ba] all increase with [Fe/H] in Gaia-Sausage- Enceladus. The [Eu/Mg] begins to increase at [Fe/H]= -2.0 and continues steadily, contrasting with the Sculptor dSph galaxy. The [Eu/Ba] increases and remains high across the [Fe/H] range, contrasting with that of the Sculptor dSph galaxy and deviating from the Fornax dSph galaxy at high [Fe/H]. The [Ba/Mg] is higher than those of the Sculptor dSph galaxy at the lowest [Fe/H] and gradually increases, similar to the Fornax dSph galaxy. We constrain three main properties of the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus star formation history: 1) star formation started gradually, 2) it extended for over 2 Gyr, and 3) it was quenched around [Fe/H] of -0.5, likely when it fell into the Milky Way.
In the summer of 2023, the textbook The Economy of Japan, prepared by a famous Russian Japanese Studies scholar I. L. Timonina, was published. As the author herself notes, her goal was to write not just a textbook containing material on the Japanese economy, but a “navigator textbook,” which gives the reader the tools to study the modern Japanese economy.These tools are represented by references to scientific literature, as well as information and statistical sources, methodological materials that provide a methodology for calculating basic economic indicators, definitions of key terms and concepts, and theoretical approaches to the study of various economic processes. Students are encouraged to work independently by using “homework” – the sections “For those who want to learn more…” and “Assignment” are placed at the end of each chapter. Concise Summaries are also a kind of “navigator” that makes it easier for readers to “move” through the content-rich and sizeable textbook material.As for the content of the textbook, it reflects almost all the most important processes and phenomena of the modern Japanese economy, and, in general, it gives the reader a fairly complete idea of the scale and quality of Japan’s economic potential, the peculiarities of the organization of the country’s economic life, its positions in the world economy, etc. Obviously, writing the textbook The Economy of Japan required a lot of effort from the author. After all, to collect, process, structure, and logically present such a huge amount of material, while focusing on a strictly defined order of presentation is a task that requires not only high professionalism, but also great effort. But this was fully justified.The textbook prepared by I. L. Timonina is written at a level that allows to characterize it not only as a high-quality educational material, but also as a highly professional scientific work. There is no doubt that it will be in demand not only by students and teachers, but also by researchers studying the problems of modern economy.
AbstractSince the formation of Seljuks in the Levant, this region was subject to unrest, which continued the chaotic trend of the post-Hamdanid. What took place in the Levant in the Seljuk period was a series of replacing the governments by the soldiers of the same dynasty one after the other from 478 till 570 A. H. This research aimed to answer this question: What was the process of substituting governments in this period? To this goal, the reasons for the rise and fall of the Levant's governments and the records of substitute dynasties had to be analyzed. By using the quantitative historical method, the procedure of these substitutions was mapped. According to this study, the chronological process of substituting the governments had increased over time. The former disturbs were managed to be settled and the short-term rulers -inheritances of Arab tribes- to be altered by long dynasties, such as the Zengid and Ayyubid dynasties.IntroductionSome of the Levant governments were overthrown by foreign powers and as usual, the stronger governments prevailed over weaker ones. In the time frame presented in this paper, several local governments fell in this manner, among which we could mention Banu Ammar in Tripoli. There was another form of overthrowing a government that arose from within and took over. Those who served the former government then became the ones possessing power, resulting in dynasties, such as Burid, Zangid Atabegs, and Ayyubid dynasties. Since this form of conquest was defined as an uprising in the political terms of that time and new dynasties needed continuous efforts to maintain power and assemble sufficient legitimacy for themselves, they went through the process of start-points and continuance. Though each new dynasty tried to have a starting point of its own, they had to use covers, such as gaining the Atabeg of a Seljuk prince or receiving a charter from the Abbasid Caliph. Thus, only the passage of time and their behaviors to preserve their land became a factor of legitimacy that they had to earn it after several internal revolts of the generals. In other words, after some time, the land became their ancestral property and the oppressing commanders needed time to construct their property.Materials and MethodsThe author first dealt with the contexts of the fall and succession of the cited governments in this period. Therefore, he used the contextual description method. Accordingly, the political and social contexts of the lands and those, who started the new governance, were examined. Because the substitutions happened from T1 till time T2 in the context of time, a chronologic method was applied to estimate the government changes. Finally, the chronological and historical methods joined a quantitative view. The time passage had to be taken seriously to evaluate the stability of the government during their ruling time. The quantitative method also took the internal courses of the governments into account. The author tried to find the substitution process year to evaluate the alternative trends and identify the quantitative strategy for these events.Discussion and ConclusionsThe substitution of the Levant dynasties at that time was affected by instability, insecurity, and the pressure of foreign governments, building the necessity of raising a new government within the former. Therefore, the people who supported the Turk or semi-Turk troops could start a new dynasty from the heart of the previous one. The survival of the new government and its resistance towards subsequent replacement largely depended on managing the crisis that happened to the Levant in their time. Hence, the Burid took over the Seljuks of Damascus, but they were able to withstand the substitution trend for a long time because of their adequacy to protect Damascus against Crusaders and expansionists. First, it was assumed that all substitutions of the Levant governments followed an integrated pattern, but the data of the quantitative hypotheses proved it wrong. Based on the years that a dynasty maintained power in the Levant, the substitution process had increased from the Seljuks to the Ayyubid dynasty. This indicated stability in the Levant since the time of the Hamdanid. When the Hamdanid dynasty ended, the Arab tribes took control of this region and handed over a turbulent region to the Seljuks. The conflict between the Seljuk rulers brought this earlier chaos to the period of Ridwan's successors. Therefore, since the arrival of the first Turkmen associated with a rough and chaotic period in the Levant, these government changes grew until the Ayyubid dynasty. Saladin and his brother managed to divide the Ayyubid dynasty into the Ayyubid of the Levant and Egypt. Still, the Ayyubid dynasty held power in the 7th century A.H. Due to the timeframe of this paper, the substitution of the Ayyubid was not looked into; however, their long-term stability and continuation could be generalized to the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, which certainly requires another research.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Asia