Development and Evaluation of Active Case Detection Methods to Support Visceral Leishmaniasis Elimination in India.

As India moves toward the elimination of visceral leishmaniasis (VL) as a public health problem, comprehensive timely case detection has become increasingly important, in order to reduce the period of infectivity and control outbreaks. During the 2000s, localized research studies suggested that a large percentage of VL cases were never reported in government data. However, assessments conducted from 2013 to 2015 indicated that 85% or more of confirmed cases were eventually captured and reported in surveillance data, albeit with significant delays before diagnosis. Based on methods developed during these assessments, the CARE India team evolved new strategies for active case detection (ACD), applicable at large scale while being sufficiently effective in reducing time to diagnosis. Active case searches are triggered by the report of a confirmed VL case, and comprise two major search mechanisms: 1) case identification based on the index case's knowledge of other known VL cases and searches in nearby houses (snowballing); and 2) sustained contact over time with a range of private providers, both formal and informal. Simultaneously, house-to-house searches were conducted in 142 villages of 47 blocks during this period. We analyzed data from 5030 VL patients reported in Bihar from January 2018 through July 2019. Of these 3033 were detected passively and 1997 via ACD (15 (0.8%) via house-to-house and 1982 (99.2%) by light touch ACD methods). We constructed multinomial logistic regression models comparing time intervals to diagnosis (30-59, 60-89 and ≥90 days with =90 days compared to the referent of <30 days for ACD vs PCD were 0.88, 0.56 and 0.42 respectively. These ACD strategies not only reduce time to diagnosis, and thus risk of transmission, but also ensure that there is a double check on the proportion of cases actually getting captured. Such a process can supplement passive case detection efforts that must go on, possibly perpetually, even after elimination as a public health problem is achieved

DFT Analyses of arsylsemicarbazone group as functional compound for application as excellent fluorescent probes and medicament: study on virtual screening through molecular docking

The present invention reports two novel functional compounds, 2-hydroxy-3-naphthaldehyde thiosemicarbazone (2H3NTS) and 2-hydroxy-3-naphthaldehyde semicarbazone (2H3NS), as plausible fuorescent probes possessing excited state intramolecular proton transfer property, and they are not yet reported to be synthesized by any research group. The DFT study reveals signifcantly higher Stokes shift (31,476 cm−1) for 2H3NS indicating swift relaxation from initial to the emissive state and reduces self-quenching from self-molecular absorption which favours its practical application. Consequently, successive in vitro activity of 2H3NTS and 2H3NS is studied in silico using molecular docking towards the inhibition capacity of target kinase protein like CDK, primarily responsible for cell growth. As expected, 2H3NS is capable of binding with both competitive ATP binding SITE I and non-competitive SITE II which lies below the T-loop, thereby inhibiting the cell growth and diferentiation. However, 2H3NTS with polarizable sulphur is incapable of binding at SITE I with selective inhibition posing the ATP site to be well conserved