Understanding the performance of irrigation systems around homes

This study examines factors that affect the efficiency of outdoor home irrigation in the Sydney Metropolitan Area (SMA). The irrigation systems of 50 home sites were monitored, over a five-month period for flow rate, start time, duration and irrigation date. The monitoring was for quantification of the water use for lawn, garden and other garden areas, understanding of the issues and factors that affect the performance of irrigation. Results show that hand watering was the most common method, accounting for 35% of the areas irrigated by homeowners. Both portable sprinklers and microjets accounted for 20% and fixed sprinklers and drip irrigation accounting for 11% and 8% respectively. The study has implications for developing suitable urban water management strategies, and significant opportunities exist for water conservation through appropriately designed educational programs and the installation of improved irrigation systems, especially for the areas that are smaller or used for home gardens. &nbsp

Hematological profile of sickle cell disease in Chhattisgarh

Background: Sickle cell disease hemoglobinopathy gets inherited in autosomal recessive pattern. In sickle cell disease substitution of amino acid valine for glutamic acid at the sixth position on beta globin chain takes place resulting in sickled hemoglobin which is a hemoglobin tetramer.Methods: A prospective observational study was conducted in the Sickle Cell Institute, Raipur, India, and Department of Pharmacology in collaboration with Department of Biochemistry, Pt. J.N.M. Medical College, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India, from February 2018 to June 2018. Patients included were in the steady state for a long period of time without any symptoms related to sickle cell disease or any other diseases which could affect hematological parameters. Subjects transfused in the last three months were excluded. Student t test and Pearson Correlation Coefficient test was done on stat pages and socscistatistics calculators. P-value<0.05 was considered as statistically significant.Results: A total of 50 subjects of sickle cell disease homozygous (SS) were studied for hematological parameters. The mean age±SD of 50 subjects were 13.3±9.24 years. Out of 50 subjects, 35 were males and 15 were females. Total RBC count, mean corpuscular volume (MCV), mean corpuscular haemoglobin (MCH) and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC) was low in present study. Significant inverse correlation was found in females between HbA2 and HbF, p=0.01, while it was insignificant and negatively correlated in males being 0.23.Conclusions: Sickle cell disease homozygous is a common and challenging health problem of Chhattisgarh population

Visualizing the Invisible - A Design Artifact for Managing Groundwater

Due to human influence, global climate change has negatively impacted many natural resources. One culminating issue regarding climate change is water scarcity. This is an especially dire issue in India, where there is a heavy dependence on groundwater. India depends on groundwater for both human and agricultural consumption, yet this dwindling resource accounts for 40% of their country’s water supply (Yeung, 2019). Sustainability is key when thinking of solutions for managing the groundwater crisis in India. One such solution is a trans-disciplinary research project known as Managing Aquifer Recharge and Sustaining Groundwater through Village-Level Intervention (MARVI). This project is focused on a network of 250 groundwater wells that spans two watersheds and five villages located in the Aravalli district in Gujarat and the Udaipur district in Rajasthan, India. MARVI collaborates with village-level volunteers referred to as Bhujal Jankaars (BJ) [“groundwater informed”] who monitor every well for groundwater levels and water quality indicators (Maheshwari, 2017). To make this monitoring easier and more affordable for rural communities, prior optimization of the well network has decreased the number of wells necessary to monitor while also decreasing the monitoring from weekly to biweekly

Visualizing the Invisible - a Design Artifact for Managing Groundwater

Water scarcity in India is a growing crisis that threatens the livelihood of many rural communities within the country. To begin addressing the problem of excessive groundwater use, a portal including an interactive dashboard was created to visualize and track groundwater wells in five different villages in the northwest region of India which is primarily a desert region. Design science research principles were followed to construct this design artifact to assist rural Indian communities and stakeholders with understanding local groundwater behavior. This dashboard can help prompt regulatory or policy actions that may help manage sustainable groundwater management and water quality. The design artifact has gone through preliminary evaluation and improvement

Optimizing the Frequency of Data Collection through Citizen Science - An Application of Analysis of Variance and Data Visualization

India is the largest user of groundwater in the world with an estimated usage of 230 km3 per year (World Bank, 2010; Saha et al., 2018; Goswami and Ghosal, 2022). Globally, areas under groundwater irrigation are the highest in India (39 million ha), followed by China (19 million ha) and the USA (17 million ha), and at present 204 km3 y-1 of groundwater is pumped annually in India (Siebert et al., 2010). Recognizing the problem and the importance of groundwater in rural areas of the country, The Managing Aquifer Recharge and sustaining Groundwater Use through Village-Level Intervention (MARVI) project commenced in 2011 to improve water security for rural communities. The project aims to teach rural communities to become more self-efficient and better manage their precious resources

Predicting Groundwater Fluctuations in Hard Rock Watersheds – An Application of Data Visualizations and Machine Learning Algorithms

Groundwater sustainability is critical to the future of agriculture and food security. The challenges are not only technical but have important social, economic, institutional and policy implications. The objective of this research is to predict groundwater levels in rural wells, allowing farmers to use their groundwater more sustainably. Data visualizations and machine learning algorithms are used to examine data collected over a five-year period from rural rock water basins in the northwestern part of India. Preliminary examination shows that the weekly collected time variable proved to be the single most valuable predictor of groundwater level, as it included implied seasonal changes in weather patterns and pumping patterns. However, due to limited rainfall outside of the monsoon season, it proved a less potent variable than previously expected

Village level identification of sugarcane in Sangali, Maharashtra using open source data

Agriculture and crop monitoring are very important for an agrarian country like India. This study is done in June Khed village in the Sangli district of Maharashtra, India to assessing the efficiency of an open source cloud-based remote sensing platform Google Earth Engine (GEE), in the village-scale identification of sugarcane. The ground-truth data was collected and the efficiency of Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellite data was assessed in driving GEE’s inbuilt Machine Learning classifiers: Classification and Regression Tree (CART), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF). Results were validated with the ground truth data and the official data. Of the methods used, SVM outperformed RF and CART with the lowest relative deviation (+9.2%), highest F1-score (0.8) and overall accuracy (78%), using the Sentinel-2 data. Results also indicated the in-situ use of observation data with high spatio-temporal resolution data. The validated model was then up-scaled for the Walwa Taluka level, to map sugarcane area that can be used for further agriculture tasks such as crop monitoring and yield prediction, leading to better management of crop and better formulating of sugarcane farmer policy

Escherichia coli as uropathogen: antibiotic susceptibility profiling

Background: Empirically chosen antibiotics based on the local resistance pattern of uropathogens remain the principle treatment of urinary tract infections (UTI).Methods: Antibiogram of most frequent uropathogen was determined. Based on the antibiogram result, authors compared effectiveness of drugs recommended for UTI by National centre for disease control (NCDC), India, and assessed age and gender based variability in the effectiveness of these drugs.Results: 1278 urine samples were accounted, of which 405 samples showed significant growth. E. coli was the most common uropathogen (n=146, 36%) followed by enterococcus species (31%) and Klebsiella pneumoniae (10%). Using McNemar’s test authors found that nitrofurantoin (90% sensitivity) was statistically the most effective drug among drugs recommended by NCDC for uncomplicated cystitis. Furthermore, authors used Fisher’s exact test on adults and paediatrics and found that significant difference in effectiveness was observed for nitrofurantoin (p-value <0.001) and cotrimoxazole (p-value 0.034). Using logistic regression, authors found that with age, effectiveness of ciprofloxacin and cotrimoxazole deteriorate significantly (p-value 0.021 and 0.002 respectively). Additionally, authors observed that cotrimoxazole has significantly better efficacy in males compared to females (p-value 0.022).Conclusions: In accordance with present study, nitrofurantoin can be used as first line treatment for uncomplicated cystitis. Age and gender should be considered while prescribing empirical treatment for UTI. Periodic surveillance should be carried out to identify the on-going pattern of antibiogram to update the guideline for empirical therapy

Safety of deferasirox as an oral iron chelator in thalassemic children

Background: Thalassemia major patients require frequent blood transfusion leading to iron overload. Iron overload is characterized by excessive iron deposition and consequent injury and dysfunction of the heart, liver, anterior pituitary, pancreas, and joints. Because physiologic mechanisms to excrete iron are very limited, patients with iron overload and its complications need safe, effective therapy that is compatible with their coexisting medical conditions. Current prospective, observational study is done to assess the safety of deferasirox as an oral iron chelator, with specific reference to rise in serum creatinine level, alanine aminotransferase level (SGPT), urine albumin level in 50 multi-transfused thalassemia major children receiving deferasirox (DFX) therapy at registered thalassemia society Raipur, India.Methods: DFX was administered in an initial dose of 20 mg/kg/day and increased to a maximum of 40 mg/kg/day. Serum creatinine, alanine aminotransferase level (SGPT), urine albumin level were estimated in pretransfusion samples at time of registration and at 3 monthly intervals (4 times). The primary end point of the study was completion of 12 months of therapy (January 2013 to December 2013).Results: Prior to DFX therapy the mean serum creatinine, SGPT, urine albumin of all cases were 0.4617 mg/dl, 20.78 U/L and nil respectively. After 12 months of DFX therapy of mean dose 38 mg/kg/day, the mean serum creatinine was. 0.4624 mg/dL. SGPT was 20.81 U/L, and urine albumin was nil.Conclusions: Deferasirox monotherapy has a good safety profile and effectively chelates total body iron. 

Knowledge, attitude and practice toward adverse drug reaction reporting among practicing clinicians at a tertiary care hospital

Background: Pharmacovigilance has evolved as an important tool for dealing with Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) both in pre-marketing and post-marketing scenario. Underreporting of ADRs at our Adverse drug reaction Monitoring Centre (AMC) led us to conduct this study to assess Knowledge, Attitude and Practice (KAP) of the practicing clinicians at our tertiary care Pt. J.N.M. Medical College associated Dr. B.R.A.M. Hospital, Raipur, Chhattisgarh, India, towards ADRs reporting.Methods: This was a cross-sectional study using pretested questionnaires consisting of 29 questions related to KAP of the practicing clinicians at Pt. J.N.M. Medical College associated Dr. B.R.A.M.  Hospital, Raipur towards ADRs reporting. The percentage of responders for each question was calculated. All statistical analysis was performed in Microsoft Office Excel 2007.Results: Out of 135 questionnaires distributed only 100 were considered for analysis, so the overall response rate was 74.07%. We calculated the result from the 100 responders. Overall 77% responders were aware of existence of ADR monitoring system in India, while only 40% were aware of its existence at their hospital. Only 8% responders had reported ADRs to the National Pharmacovigilance Centre and 10% to the Adverse drug reaction Monitoring Centre (AMC) at their hospital. Lack of knowledge about where, how and whom to report ADRs, lack of time, inability to decide what to report (known or unknown ADRs) and unavailability of ADR reporting form were the important factors discouraging them reporting ADRs.Conclusions: Creating awareness regarding ADR reporting through CMEs among practicing clinicians and early sensitization at medical undergraduate level for medical students may improve the current ADR reporting rate.