A report of sample survey on births and deaths in agra district

The government of India has considered Agra to be made a ‘target free district'for MCH and family welfare programmes. For Intervention of this strategy, it is necessary to know the current trends of births, deaths and other parameters related to mother and child health, present study was under­taken in selected rural and urban slum areas of Agra district, covering total population of44,868. It was found that birth rate, death rate, infant mor­tality rate and maternal mortality rate was higher in rural area as compared to urban area. Maximum number of births were recorded during October and November and death rate vraj higher during November and December. Main causes of infact mortality ;were prematurity, low birth weight, diar­rhoea and pnettmonie and that of maternal mortality were puerperal sepsis and haemorrhag

Characteristics of Different Systems for the Solar Drying of Crops

Solar dryers are used to enable the preservation of agricultural crops, food processing industries for dehydration of fruits and vegetables, fish and meat drying, dairy industries for production of milk powder, seasoning of wood and timber, textile industries for drying of textile materials. The fundamental concepts and contexts of their use to dry crops is discussed in the chapter. It is shown that solar drying is the outcome of complex interactions particular between the intensity and duration of solar energy, the prevailing ambient relative humidity and temperature, the characteristics of the particular crop and its pre-preparation and the design and operation of the solar dryer

The Indian cobra reference genome and transcriptome enables comprehensive identification of venom toxins

Snakebite envenoming is a serious and neglected tropical disease that kills ~100,000 people annually. High-quality, genome-enabled comprehensive characterization of toxin genes will facilitate development of effective humanized recombinant antivenom. We report a de novo near-chromosomal genome assembly of Naja naja, the Indian cobra, a highly venomous, medically important snake. Our assembly has a scaffold N50 of 223.35 Mb, with 19 scaffolds containing 95% of the genome. Of the 23,248 predicted protein-coding genes, 12,346 venom-gland-expressed genes constitute the \u27venom-ome\u27 and this included 139 genes from 33 toxin families. Among the 139 toxin genes were 19 \u27venom-ome-specific toxins\u27 (VSTs) that showed venom-gland-specific expression, and these probably encode the minimal core venom effector proteins. Synthetic venom reconstituted through recombinant VST expression will aid in the rapid development of safe and effective synthetic antivenom. Additionally, our genome could serve as a reference for snake genomes, support evolutionary studies and enable venom-driven drug discovery