Covishield vaccine experience in a health care setting

Background: SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has affected the whole world and India is one among the most affected countries. Vaccination is the most important tool to halt this pandemic and vaccine hesitancy unfortunately derails vaccination drive. Vaccine hesitancy among people is mainly due to concerns about vaccine safety! This study was done to assess adverse effects of Covishield vaccine among health care workers in a single health care organization.Methods: All the vaccine recipients were requested to answer a questionnaire with demographic details and various side effects following both the doses of Covishield vaccination.Results: About 665 employees responded to the questionnaire and the most common adverse reaction following Covishield vaccine was injection site pain, which was reported by 63% of vaccinees after first dose of vaccine.Conclusions: Covishield vaccine is relatively safe and incidence of major adverse events are rare following vaccination

Remdesivir use in pregnant women with severe COVID-19

Numerous therapeutic strategies are proposed and tested for SARS CO-V2 infection. Remdesivir is researched and proposed by various societies. Studies about efficacy and safety in pregnancy are limited. A case series of 22 pregnant women effected with severe COVID disease and who received remdesivir, over a period of 1 year from May 2020 to May 2021 is presented. The 12 antenatal and 10 post-partum women were included. Demographic factors, baseline, day 3 and day 7 blood values of haemoglobin, total leukocyte count, platelets, liver enzymes, serum creatinine and D-dimers were collected. Adverse events were reported. Pregnancy complications and foetal and neonatal complications were studied. Pre-eclampsia was the most common comorbidity. The 99% of pregnant women and 100% of postpartum women recovered from COVID disease after remdesivir use. Lab investigations did not change considerably during the week of remdesivir use, suggesting its safety. Incidence of adverse events reported is 36.3%, of these 9% are serious adverse events. There are no antenatal or post-natal complications. No incidence of teratogenicity, foetal or neonatal complications. Incidence of feto-maternal transmission was 9%. Remdesivir is effective in treating severe SARS-CoV2 infection and has safety profile in pregnancy with regard to maternal and foetal effects

Myocardial abscess secondary to staphylococcal septicemia: Diagnosis with 3D echocardiography

A 56 years old gentleman with staphylococcal septicemia with metastatic abscesses in spleen and heart. Real time 3D trans thoracic echocardiography could not only confirm the diagnosis of myocardial abscess but also well delineate it and identify adjacent structures

Amikacin-induced type 5 Bartter-like syndrome with severe hypocalcemia

Aminoglycoside-induced renal toxicity is well known and may manifest with nonoliguric renal failure or renal tubular dysfunction. Aminoglycoside-induced renal tubular dysfunction could result in diffuse damage or manifest as a Fanconi-like syndrome, Bartter-like syndrome, or distal renal tubular acidosis. We discuss a patient who developed severe renal tubular dysfunction secondary to short-term therapy with Amikacin, resulting in refractory hypokalemia, hypocalcemia, hypomagnesemia, metabolic alkalosis, and polyuria. This constellation of biochemical abnormalities mimic Type 5 Bartter′s syndrome, where there is activating mutation of the calcium sensing receptor in the thick ascending loop of Henle and the distal tubule. In this case this activation of the calcium sensing receptor was triggered by amikacin. This phenomenon has been described with gentamicin though never with amikacin. Recovery of the tubular dysfunction took 15 days following cessation of the offending drug, Amikacin

Towards an AI-Infused Interdisciplinary Curriculum for Middle-Grade Classrooms

As AI becomes more widely used across a variety of disciplines, it is increasingly important to teach AI concepts to K-12 students in order to prepare them for an AI-driven future workforce. Hence, educators and researchers have been working to develop curricula that make these concepts accessible to K-12 students. We are designing and developing a comprehensive AI curriculum delivered through a series of carefully crafted activities in an adapted \emph{Snap!} environment for middle-grade students. In this work, we lay out the proposed content of our curriculum and present the design, development, and implementation results of the first unit of our curriculum that focuses on teaching the breadth-first search algorithm. The activities in this unit have been revised after being piloted with a single high-school student. These activities were further refined after a group of K-12 teachers examined and critiqued them during a two-week professional development workshop. Our teachers created a lesson plan around the activities and implemented that lesson in a summer workshop with 14 middle school students. Our results demonstrated that our activities were successful in helping many of the students in understanding and implementing the algorithm through block-based programming while extra supplementary material was needed to assist some other students. In this paper, we explain our curriculum and technology, the results of implementing the first unit of our curriculum in a summer camp, and lessons learned for future developments

Hantavirus infection: A case report from India

The clinical presentation of hantavirus infections in India is unclear. We report here a case of hantavirus infection in a 46 year old quarry worker presenting with fever, abdominal pain, jaundice, thrombocytopenia and renal dysfunction. Seroconversion and rising anti-hantavirus IgG titers were taken as evidence of hantavirus infection. Clinicians should consider hantavirus infections in the differential diagnosis of acute febrile illness along with scrub typhus, leptospirosis and dengue