Marital Violence and Women's Employment and Property Status: Evidence from North Indian Villages

Dominant development policy approaches recommend women's employment on the grounds that it facilitates their empowerment, which in turn is believed to be instrumental in enhancing women's well-being. However, empirical work on the relationship between women's employment status and their well-being as measured by freedom from marital violence yields an ambiguous picture. Motivated by this ambiguity, this paper draws on testimonies of men and women and data gathered from rural Uttar Pradesh, to examine the effect of women's employment and asset status as measured by their participation in paid work and their ownership of property, respectively, on spousal violence. Unlike the existing literature, we treat women's work status and violence as simultaneously determined and find that women's engagement in paid work and ownership of property, are associated with sharp reductions in marital violence.domestic violence, employment status, property ownership, India

Evaluation of the prevention of parent to child transmission program in a rural tertiary care hospital of West Bengal, India

Background: In India, 67,500 infants acquire HIV infection yearly due to mother to child transmission. Objective: The objective was to assess the operational aspect of the Prevention of Parent to Child Transmission (PPTCT) program in a tertiary care hospital and explore its bottleneck. Materials and Methods: A 5-year (2004-2008) prospective evaluation study was conducted among the pregnant women attending Obstetrics Department of a rural tertiary care hospital, since the year of implementation. Indicators were used according to UNAIDS/WHO guideline. Results: Out of 40,140 registered pregnant women, 23,812 were counseled of which 19,794 were agreed to undergo HIV testing and 111 were found HIV positive with a prevalence of 0.56%. Overall HIV counseling and testing rates were 59.32% and 83.13%, respectively. The nevirapine (NVP) dispensing rate of the mother and newborn were 29.72% and 85.4%, respectively. At 18 months of age, 85% babies were found HIV negative in the mother baby pair who received NVP with absolutely formula feeding but it was 42.8% without such intervention. Conclusion: Majority of the pregnant women who came to the labor room directly were deprived of the program (PPTCT) coverage. Although the HIV testing rate reached the WHO target which was excellent, but the NVP dispensing rate lagged far behind

Systematic Study of Mutually Inclusive Influences of Temperature and Substitution on the Coordination Geometry of Co(II) in a Series of Coordination Polymers and Their Properties

In this contribution we have extended our current research goal of designing functional metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) using bispyrazole type ligands. Accordingly, ten new cobalt-based MOFs have been synthesized using a simple bispyrazole ligand, 4,4′-methylene-bispyrazole (H₂MBP), and isophthalic acid (H₂IPA) and its four 5-substituted derivatives R-H₂IPA (R = COOH, OH, ^tBu, NH₂). The major aim of this study was to validate the mutual influence of temperature and substitutions on the final structural self-assembly. Five different isophthalic acid derivatives were used to study the influence of substituents while each reaction was carried out at two different temperatures to assess the temperature effect. A clear correlation was observed between the reaction temperature and the coordination number of the cobalt atoms which consequently changes the self-assembly pattern. We have also shown that the periodical change in coordination number did bring about some systematic changes in the structural network via secondary building unit selectivity. With the presence of a tunable cavity inside the network, high surface area, and unsaturated metal centers, MOFs show highly encouraging photocatalytic degradation of toxic dye molecule with a potential application in wastewater purification. Another fascinating aspect of this work is the construction of magnetic coordination polymers with the occurrence of a not-so-common MCE behavior of cobalt-based MOF

A 31-residue peptide induces aggregation of tau's microtubule-binding region in cells

The self-propagation of misfolded conformations of tau underlies neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's. There is considerable interest in discovering the minimal sequence and active conformational nucleus that defines this self-propagating event. The microtubule-binding region, spanning residues 244-372, reproduces much of the aggregation behaviour of tau in cells and animal models. Further dissection of the amyloid-forming region to a hexapeptide from the third microtubule-binding repeat resulted in a peptide that rapidly forms fibrils in vitro. We show that this peptide lacks the ability to seed aggregation of tau244-372 in cells. However, as the hexapeptide is gradually extended to 31 residues, the peptides aggregate more slowly and gain potent activity to induce aggregation of tau244-372 in cells. X-ray fibre diffraction, hydrogen-deuterium exchange and solid-state NMR studies map the beta-forming region to a 25-residue sequence. Thus, the nucleus for self-propagating aggregation of tau244-372 in cells is packaged in a remarkably small peptide