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A county in southwestern China has killed as many as 50,000 dogs in a government campaign ordered after three people died from rabies, official media reported Tuesday.
The five-day massacre in Yunnan province's Mouding county spared only military guard dogs and police canine units, the Shanghai Daily reported, citing local media.
Dogs being walked were taken from their owners and beaten on the spot, the newspaper said. Other killing teams entered villages at night, creating noise to get dogs barking, then honing in and beating them to death.
Owners were offered 63 cents per animal to kill their dogs before the teams were sent in, the report said.
The massacre was widely discussed on the Internet, with both legal scholars and animal rights activists criticizing it as crude and cold-blooded. The World Health Organization said more emphasis needed to be placed on prevention.
"Wiping out the dogs shows these government officials didn't do their jobs right in protecting people from rabies in the first place," Legal Daily, a newspaper run by the central government's Politics and Law Committee, said in an editorial in its online edition.
Dr. Francette Dusan, a WHO expert on diseases passed from animals to people, said effective rabies control required coordinated efforts between human and animal health agencies and authorities.
"This has not been pursued adequately to date in China with most control efforts consisting of purely reactive dog culls," Dusan said.
The Shanghai Daily said 360 of Mouding county's 200,000 residents suffered dog bites this year. The three rabies victims included a 4-year-old girl, the report said.
"With the aim to keep this horrible disease from people, we decided to kill the dogs," Li Haibo, a spokesman for the county government was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Calls to county government offices rang unanswered on Tuesday.
China has seen a major rise in the number of rabies cases in recent years, with 2,651 reported deaths from the disease in 2004, the last year for which data was available, according to the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts have tied the rise in part to an increase in dog ownership, particularly in rural areas where about 70 percent of households keep dogs. Only about 3 percent of Chinese dogs are vaccinated against rabies, according to the center. Access to appropriate treatment is highly limited, especially in the countryside.
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"Jaw-dropping strength. Breath-taking speed. Phenomenal agility. Olympian feats."
With origins and abilities worthy of fitting a comic book hero, these are words that reporters and doctors have used to describe Liam Hoekstra. The thing is this: Liam is only a toddler.
Born only 19 months ago, Liam came into the world with many birth defects. He had a small hole in his heart, enlarged kidneys, frequently vomited and was born four weeks premature. Medical records indicated that his biological father was "unusually strong".
Due to conditional circumstance, Liam was adopted at birth by the Hoekstra family.
Little did the family know that they were adopting a child with a very rare and special genetic condition.
The Hoekstra's quickly began to notice Liam being able to do things out of the ordinary. Two days after birth, he was able to fully stand-up and support his own weight, given someone held his hands. Months later he began developing ripped abs, naturally doing pull-ups, inverted sit-ups, Olympic styled iron cross, thigh muscles compared to that of Lance Armstrong and even punching holes into walls during tantrums (accidentally gave his Mom a black eye once as well).
What really amazed his family was what happened whenever he fell.
"When he fell backward, he would land on his butt, but he never hit his head on the ground," Dana Hoekstra said. "His stomach would tense up and he would catch himself before his head hit the ground. You could see his stomach muscles. He had a little six-pack," said his adoptive mother, Dana, in an interview.
After further investigation into Liam's ability, doctor's found he was genetically unique as he has a condition called myostatin related muscle hypertrophy.
In Liam's case, his body's muscles reject myostatin, allowing them to undergo quick growth and repair.
What does that entail, exactly?
Liam can expect to have up to 50% more muscle mass than average, ridiculous levels of strength, fast metabolism, and hardly any body fat. His mother mentions, "Liam has never had any body fat...the only fat he has is in his cheeks."
Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy is a condition that is still somewhat new to scientific scrutiny, and until 2000, was not adequately documented as occurring in humans. Before this time, the best known example was that from ridiculously buff Belgian Blue cattle, a picture of which is below.
While this condition is extremely rare in humans, to the point where doctors cannot predict with significant confidence how many people would have it worldwide, there were some concerns about Liam's lack of fat, which is needed for proper neurological development. Fortunately, like the other mentioned conditions that were present at his birth (all of which healed and subsided), Liam amazingly has shown little to no problems.
The biggest concern right now for the Hoekstra family is keeping Liam fed and at ideal weights. With his enlarged muscles and super-fast metabolism, odds are he can probably down his fair share of giant steaks.
Make sure to check out the source link below for more on this story, it is pretty neat.
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