The World Health Organization is set to recognize gaming disorder as a serious mental health issue. 

In its 11th revision of the International Classification of Disease, a diagnostic manual to be published next year, the U.N. health agency defines gaming disorder as a “persistent or recurrent” problem that can cause “significant impairment” to the gamer’s life, including to family, education, work and friends. 

The agency says the disorder is characterized by giving increasing priority to gaming, online and offline, over other aspects of everyday life. 

Gregory Harti, a WHO spokesman, told CNN that the entry on the disorder “includes only a clinical description and not prevention and treatment options.”

According to a report released in 2016 by the gaming industry, 63 percent of U.S. households include a gamer, who on average has been playing video games for 13 years. 

The increasing popularity of video gaming became evident when in the past three years, 50 U.S. colleges established varsity gaming teams, with scholarships, coaches and game analysts. 
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After decades of hope and high promise, this was the year scientists really showed they could doctor DNA to successfully treat diseases. Gene therapies to treat cancer and even pull off the biblical-sounding feat of helping the blind to see were approved by U.S. regulators, establishing gene manipulation as a new mode of medicine.

Almost 20 years ago, a teen’s death in a gene experiment put a chill on what had been a field full of outsized expectations. Now, a series of jaw-dropping successes have renewed hopes that some one-time fixes of DNA, the chemical code that governs life, might turn out to be cures.

“I am totally willing to use the ‘C’ word,” said the National Institutes of Health’s director, Dr. Francis Collins.

Gene therapy aims to treat the root cause of a problem by deleting, adding or altering DNA, rather than just treating symptoms that result from the genetic flaw.

The advent of gene editing — a more precise and long-lasting way to do gene therapy — may expand the number and types of diseases that can be treated. In November, California scientists tried editing a gene inside someone’s body for the first time, using a tool called zinc finger nucleases for a man with a metabolic disease. It’s like a cut-and-paste operation to place a new gene in a specific spot. Tests of another editing tool called CRISPR, to genetically alter human cells in the lab, may start next year.

“There are a few times in our lives when science astonishes us. This is one of those times,” Dr. Matthew Porteus, a Stanford University gene editing expert, told a Senate panel discussing this technology last month.

It’s a common path for trail-blazing science — success initially seems within reach, setbacks send researchers back to the lab, new understandings emerge over years, and studies ultimately reveal what is safe and effective.

Here is a look at what’s been achieved and what lies ahead.

A string of firsts

The year started with no gene therapies sold in the U.S. and only a couple elsewhere. Then the Food and Drug Administration approved the first CAR-T cell therapies, which alter a patient’s own blood cells to turn them into specialized cancer killers. They’re only for certain types of leukemia and lymphoma now, but more are in the works for other blood cancers.

Last week, the FDA approved Luxturna, the first gene therapy for an inherited disease, a form of blindness. People with it can’t make a protein needed by the retina, tissue at the back of the eye that converts light into signals to the brain, enabling sight. The therapy injects a modified virus containing a corrective gene into the retina so the cells can make the protein.

Children who received the treatment told what it was like to gain vision.

“Oh yikes, colors. Colors are super fun,” said 13-year-old Caroline Carper of Little Rock, Arkansas. “And the sunshine is blinding.”

Gene therapies also showed some promise against a variety of diseases including hemophilia, a blood clotting problem; “bubble boy” disease, where a flawed immune system leaves patients vulnerable to fatal infections; and sickle cell disease, a serious and painful blood disorder common among black people.

It’s not all good news, though. The therapies don’t work for everyone. They’re shockingly expensive. And no one knows how long some results will last, though scientists say the aim is a one-time repair that gets at the root cause.

 “The whole promise … is to cure diseases. It’s based on the rationale of fixing the problem,” not just improving treatment, said Dr. Carl June, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who pioneered CAR-T therapy.   

A new frontier: Gene editing

In mid-November, Brian Madeux, a 44-year-old Phoenix man with a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome, had just become the first person to try an experimental gene editing treatment.

“I believe in science,” he texted The Associated Press after doctors sent viruses containing a corrective gene and an editing tool through an IV into his body. The hope is that the gene and the editing tool would enter some of his liver cells and insert the instructions needed to start making an enzyme he lacks.

It’s not known yet if it worked. Sangamo Therapeutics is testing its therapy in several studies, and independent monitors will help decide when results are released.

“It’s a pretty exciting milestone,” Collins said, because it shows a way to treat more diseases than ones that can be addressed now by altering blood cells in the lab or injecting genes into the eye.

“You can imagine having a scalable approach to thousands of genetic diseases,” he said.

What’s next

Top of Collins’ list: muscular dystrophy and sickle cell.

There’s been so much progress that the NIH has modified an oversight panel that just a few years ago reviewed every gene therapy experiment in the U.S. Most are considered safe enough to go ahead without the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee’s review. The panel hasn’t even met for a year.

When the panel was formed decades ago, “there was a lot of concern that a graduate student could take some of this home and create a monster in his basement,” said one panel member, Boston scientist Dr. Howard Kaufman. 

Those fears have eased, he said.

“There’s no monsters that have materialized from this.”
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Russia’s latest space launch failures have prompted authorities to take a closer look into the nation’s struggling space industry, the Kremlin said Thursday.

A Russian weather satellite and nearly 20 micro-satellites from other nations were lost following a failed launch from Russia’s new cosmodrome in the Far East on November 28. And in another blow to the Russian space industry, communications with a Russian-built communications satellite for Angola, the African nation’s first space vehicle, were lost following its launch on Tuesday.

Asked about the failures, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Thursday that authorities warrant a thorough analysis of the situation in the space industry.

Amid the failures, Russian officials have engaged in a round of finger-pointing.

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who oversees Russia’s military industrial complex and space industries, said in a television interview Wednesday that the November 28 launch from the new Vostochny launch pad in Russia’s Far East failed because the rocket had been programmed to blastoff from the Russia-leased Baikonur launch pad in Kazakhstan instead of Vostochny. He accused the Russian space agency Roscosmos of “systemic management mistakes.”

Roscosmos fired back Thursday, dismissing Rogozin’s claim of the flawed programming. It did acknowledge some shortcomings that led to the launch failure and said a number of officials were reprimanded.

Rogozin quickly riposted on Facebook, charging that Roscosmos was “trying to prove that failures occur not because of mistakes in management but just due to some `circumstances.”‘

The cause of the failure of the Angolan satellite hasn’t been determined yet. Communications with the satellite, which was built by the Russian RKK Energia company, a leading spacecraft manufacturer, were lost after it entered a designated orbit.

Russia has continued to rely on Soviet-designed booster rockets to launching commercial satellites, as well as crews and cargo to the International Space Station. A trio of astronauts from Russia, Japan and the United States arrived at the space outpost last week following their launch from Baikonur.

While Russian rockets have established a stellar reputation for their reliability, a string of failed launches in recent years has called into question Russia’s ability to maintain the same high standards for manufacturing space equipment.

Glitches found in Russia’s Proton and Soyuz rockets in 2016 were traced to manufacturing flaws at the plant in Voronezh.Roscosmos sent more than 70 rocket engines back to production lines to replace faulty components, a move that resulted in a yearlong break in Proton launches.

The suspension badly dented the nation’s niche in the global market for commercial satellite launches. Last year, Russia for the first time fell behind both the U.S. and China in the number of launches.

While Russia plans to continue to use Baikonur for most of its space launches, it has poured billions of dollars in to build the new Vostochny launch pad. A launch pad for Soyuz finally opened in 2016, but another one for the heavier Angara rockets is only set to be completed in late 2021 and its future remains unclear, drawing questions about the feasibility of the expensive project.

Work at Vostochny also has been dogged by scandals involving protests by unpaid workers and the arrests of construction officials accused of embezzlement.

Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow contributed to this report.
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Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said Wednesday that the failed launch of a 2.6 billion-ruble ($44.95 million) satellite last month was due to an embarrassing programming error.

Russian space agency Roscosmos said last month that it had lost contact with the newly launched weather satellite — the Meteor-M — after it blasted off from Russia’s new Vostochny cosmodrome in the Far East.

Eighteen smaller satellites belonging to scientific, research and commercial companies from Russia, Norway, Sweden, the United States, Japan, Canada and Germany were on board the same rocket.

Speaking to Rossiya 24 state TV channel, Rogozin said the failure had been caused by human error. 

The rocket carrying the satellites had been programmed with the wrong coordinates, he said, saying it had been given bearings for takeoff from a different cosmodrome — Baikonur — which Moscow leases from Kazakhstan.

“The rocket was really programmed as if it was taking off from Baikonur,” said Rogozin. “They didn’t get the coordinates right.”

The Vostochny spaceport, laid out in the thick taiga forest of the Amur region, is the first civilian rocket launch site in Russia.

In April last year, after delays and massive costs overruns, Russia launched its first rocket from Vostochny, a day after a technical glitch forced an embarrassing postponement of the event in the presence of President Vladimir Putin.
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When Cyclone Winston pummeled through Fiji last year, the largest storm recorded in the southern hemisphere, Sofia Talei’s taro and cassava crops were destroyed, leaving her livelihood as a farmer uncertain.

“I was so desperate. All the effort we put into it was destroyed after a few hours,” Talei, 33, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

But after the storm came an unexpected surprise: a wealth of financial literacy, business, and agricultural training, which led to Talei this year becoming the first female president of the main fruit and vegetable market in the Fijian capital Suva.

Women’s rights campaigners say disasters can present an opportunity for countries to not only rebuild infrastructure, but also tackle gender inequality, such as helping more women get into work and finding ways to address gender violence.

“Through the leadership training, it’s empowering us women to stand up and fight for women’s rights,” said Talei, a mother of three, standing proudly by her market stall, where she now sells coconuts and fast-growing crops like chilies, eggplants and cabbage which are better suited to unpredictable climates.

For stubborn gender stereotypes in small Pacific islands like Fiji mean women have fewer rights, such as access to services like banking, formal jobs, or even a chance to work, said Aleta Miller from U.N. Women in Fiji, which provides training for market stall vendors like Talei.

Such gender inequality has also led to high rates of violence against women. Two in every three women in the Pacific will experience violence — twice the global average — according to U.N. Women.

“What drives this violence? Fundamentally, it’s harmful social norms: deeply-held attitudes, beliefs, values and behaviors within society about the role of men and women,” said Miller, on the sidelines of a conference run by civil rights group CIVICUS in Suva earlier this month.

“Women hold the same values, in some cases. A woman may agree with a man that he has the right to keep her in the house and to make her report to him where ever she goes,” she said.

‘Change what’s wrong’

When disaster strikes — which is becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change — women’s vulnerabilities are even more exposed, said researcher Virginie Le Masson from London-based think tank Overseas Development Institute (ODI).

Some women and girls are forced to sell sex to survive, and some are raped due to the lack of shelter after disasters such as cyclones, earthquakes or floods.

“It’s a combination of existing inequality and violence against women and girls, and the failure of protective systems after a disaster,” said Le Masson. “But climate change is not the reason why women have been discriminated against for the last centuries.”

Le Masson said disasters can present an opportunity for women.

“This is an opportunity to change what is wrong. [After a disaster] we need everyone in the community to contribute to rebuild the economy and that’s an opportunity for women to take part,” she said.

Only 40 percent of Fijian women have formal work, compared to 80 percent of men, according to the International Women’s Development Agency.

U.N. Women’s Miller said providing skills training for women before and after a disaster is one way to help challenge ingrained gender stereotypes.

“It’s more than money and profit, it’s also about her agency [and] having more of a voice,” said Miller.

“We have many women telling us, ‘I never saw myself as a business woman. This is who I am and this is my future,'” she said.
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The environmental group Sea Shepherd said fishermen fired 25 shots at one of its night-vision drones in Mexico’s Gulf of California, bringing it down.

Various drones have been employed to patrol the Gulf, also known as the Sea of Cortez, to combat illegal fishing and save the critically endangered vaquita marina, the world’s smallest porpoise.

Poachers often go out at night to set nets for totoaba, a fish whose swim bladder is prized in China. But vaquitas often get caught in totoaba nets, causing the population to plunge to less than 30.

Sea Shepherd has been the target of demonstrations by fishermen in the past, but said the Christmas Eve shooting represented “a new level of violence.”

The group said Tuesday that its drone had located four small boats illegally fishing for totoaba.

Men on three of the boats were observed firing at the device until its camera shut off.

The drone was then listed as “disconnected,” indicating it went down.

In the past, fishermen have thrown rocks and bricks at drones, staged demonstrations demanding that Sea Shepherd boats be expelled, burned vehicles and patrol boats, and beat inspectors from the office of environmental protection, but this is the first time they fired guns.

In other parts of the world, Sea Shepherd vessels have rammed into whaling ships to deter illegal activities.

But in the Gulf, the group has peacefully patrolled the waters, looking for vaquitas dead or alive and gill nets, which it removes.

The patrol effort has been welcomed by the Mexican government, which has had a difficult time enforcing a ban on gill net fishing because fishermen use fast boats, leading vessels on hours-long chases.

Sometimes, pickup trucks drop boat trailers onto beaches and haul off small fishing crafts before authorities arrive.
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There’s a good chance that 2017 will go down in the history of medicine as a year when genetic engineering finally started moving from research labs to clinics. Several successful stories coming from different parts of the world promise that hereditary diseases and cancers may soon be conquered. VOA’s George Putic looks back at a few of these cases.
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