Penetrating tracheal injuries – A Kashmir experience

Background: The increased incidence of tracheal injuries encountered during war like situation in the valley of Kashmir has prompted us to conduct this study.Method: The study was conducted retrospectively on 29 patients managed in the past in our hospital and 7 patients were managed after the study was undertaken. After recording the observations made in managing the patients of penetrating tracheal trauma, the results were analyzed and entered in the individual patients’ protocol.Results: There was a predominance of males with a male to female sex ratio of 5: 1. The majority (69% had fire arms trauma. Hissing wounds, respiratory distress and haemoptysis were the commonest presenting complaints. There were 4 deaths. Complications were observed in 16 (50%) of the 36 patients who survived and included hoarseness in 6 and tracheal stenosis in 5 cases.Conclusion: It was concluded that earliest possible diagnosis followed by securing ofairway and prompt repair is the mainstay of management of penetrating tracheal injuries

Point Prevalence of Gastrointestinal Helminthiaisis in Buffaloes of Jammu, India

The present study was carried out to determine the prevalence of gastrointestinal helminthiasis in buffaloes of Jammu area of Jammu And Kashmir State for the period of one year. For this purpose, 173 faecal samples were collected from different areas (Bisnah, R S Pura, Sidrah, Jammu city and Akhnoor) of subtropical Jammu. Parasitological procedures used for the identification of helminthes were direct and indirect methods. The overall prevalence of helminthiasis was 38.72%. Helminthic infection was recorded throughout the year with seasonal variations

Fluctuations, dissipation and the dynamical Casimir effect

Vacuum fluctuations provide a fundamental source of dissipation for systems coupled to quantum fields by radiation pressure. In the dynamical Casimir effect, accelerating neutral bodies in free space give rise to the emission of real photons while experiencing a damping force which plays the role of a radiation reaction force. Analog models where non-stationary conditions for the electromagnetic field simulate the presence of moving plates are currently under experimental investigation. A dissipative force might also appear in the case of uniform relative motion between two bodies, thus leading to a new kind of friction mechanism without mechanical contact. In this paper, we review recent advances on the dynamical Casimir and non-contact friction effects, highlighting their common physical origin.Comment: 39 pages, 4 figures. Review paper to appear in Lecture Notes in Physics, Volume on Casimir Physics, edited by Diego Dalvit, Peter Milonni, David Roberts, and Felipe da Rosa. Minor changes, a reference adde

Neutrino mass spectrum from the results of neutrino oscillation experiments

All the possible schemes of neutrino mixing with four massive neutrinos inspired by the existing experimental indications in favor of neutrino mixing are considered in a model independent way. Assuming that in short-baseline experiments only one mass-squared difference is relevant, it is shown that the scheme with a neutrino mass hierarchy is not compatible with the experimental results. Only two schemes with two pairs of neutrinos with close masses separated by a mass difference of the order of 1 eV are in agreement with the results of all experiments. One of these schemes leads to possibly observable effects in Tritium and neutrinoless double-beta decay experiments.Comment: Latex2e file, 13 pages including 2 figures. Postscript also available at http://www.to.infn.it/teorici/giunti/papers.htm

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Co-limitation towards lower latitudes shapes global forest diversity gradients

The latitudinal diversity gradient (LDG) is one of the most recognized global patterns of species richness exhibited across a wide range of taxa. Numerous hypotheses have been proposed in the past two centuries to explain LDG, but rigorous tests of the drivers of LDGs have been limited by a lack of high-quality global species richness data. Here we produce a high-resolution (0.025° × 0.025°) map of local tree species richness using a global forest inventory database with individual tree information and local biophysical characteristics from ~1.3 million sample plots. We then quantify drivers of local tree species richness patterns across latitudes. Generally, annual mean temperature was a dominant predictor of tree species richness, which is most consistent with the metabolic theory of biodiversity (MTB). However, MTB underestimated LDG in the tropics, where high species richness was also moderated by topographic, soil and anthropogenic factors operating at local scales. Given that local landscape variables operate synergistically with bioclimatic factors in shaping the global LDG pattern, we suggest that MTB be extended to account for co-limitation by subordinate drivers

Diversity and Activity of Sulfate-reducing bacteria in Sulfidogenic Wastewater Treatment Reactors

Applied Science

Soil-transmitted helminths in relation to hemoglobin status among school children of the Kashmir Valley.

Soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) remain a major threat to the health of children throughout the world, mostly in developing nations. The aim of the present study was to determine any relationship between STHs and hemoglobin status in school children of Kashmir Valley (India). Stool and blood samples were collected from 382 male and female school children in the age group of 5-15 yr from all 6 school districts of the Kashmir Valley. Finger-prick blood samples were used to collect the hemoglobin, which was then measured on-site by Sahli's acid hematin method; stool samples were processed using both simple smear and zinc sulphate concentration methods. Of the 382 children surveyed, 299 (78.27%) were infected with Ascaris lumbricoides, Trichuris trichiura, or both. Children infected by STHs were found to have lower mean values of hemoglobin than uninfected children. The present study reveals that STHs are abundant among school children of Kashmir Valley, creating a negative effect on the hemoglobin values and indicating the necessity of implementing control measures

Penetrating Tracheal Injuries – A Kashmir Experience

Background: The increased incidence of tracheal injuries encountered during war like situation in the valley of Kashmir has prompted us to conduct this study. Method: The study was conducted retrospectively on 29 patients managed in the past in our hospital and 7 patients were managed after the study was undertaken. After recording the observations made in managing the patients of penetrating tracheal trauma, the results were analyzed and entered in the individual patients’ protocol. Results: There was a predominance of males with a male to female sex ratio of 5: 1. The majority (69% had fire arms trauma. Hissing wounds, respiratory distress and haemoptysis were the commonest presenting complaints. There were 4 deaths. Complications were observed in 16 (50%) of the 36 patients who survived and included hoarseness in 6 and tracheal stenosis in 5 cases. Conclusion: It was concluded that earliest possible diagnosis followed by securing of airway and prompt repair is the mainstay of management of penetrating tracheal injuries