Influenza Vaccine Production Capacity Building in Developing Countries: Example of the Serum Institute of India

AbstractIt is predicted that in case of an influenza pandemic, there will be a significant gap between potentially available vaccine supply and international demand. This paved the way for a WHO Global Pandemic Influenza Action Plan (GAP) aiming at increasing the world's production capacity for pandemic vaccine. In November 2006, six developing country manufacturers were awarded grants either to develop processes for production of inactivated or live attenuated seasonal and/or H5N1 influenza vaccines or for establishing filling facilities using imported antigens. In April 2009, spread of a new H1N1 influenza virus was identified which took a pandemic form. This paper gives an overview of influenza vaccine capacity building of developing country's manufacturers identified in WHO's GAP. Further, an account of developments at Serum Institute of India Limited (SIIL), one of recipients of WHO grant to develop pandemic influenza vaccine, are presented as a case study. Such initiatives have strengthened developing country vaccine manufacturers ability to respond to a pandemic situation in the future

Online Lifelong Generalized Zero-Shot Learning

Methods proposed in the literature for zero-shot learning (ZSL) are typically suitable for offline learning and cannot continually learn from sequential streaming data. The sequential data comes in the form of tasks during training. Recently, a few attempts have been made to handle this issue and develop continual ZSL (CZSL) methods. However, these CZSL methods require clear task-boundary information between the tasks during training, which is not practically possible. This paper proposes a task-free (i.e., task-agnostic) CZSL method, which does not require any task information during continual learning. The proposed task-free CZSL method employs a variational autoencoder (VAE) for performing ZSL. To develop the CZSL method, we combine the concept of experience replay with knowledge distillation and regularization. Here, knowledge distillation is performed using the training sample's dark knowledge, which essentially helps overcome the catastrophic forgetting issue. Further, it is enabled for task-free learning using short-term memory. Finally, a classifier is trained on the synthetic features generated at the latent space of the VAE. Moreover, the experiments are conducted in a challenging and practical ZSL setup, i.e., generalized ZSL (GZSL). These experiments are conducted for two kinds of single-head continual learning settings: (i) mild setting-: task-boundary is known only during training but not during testing; (ii) strict setting-: task-boundary is not known at training, as well as testing. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets exhibit the validity of the approach for CZSL

On the Stiffness and Damping Coefficients of Constant Flow Valve Compensated Conical Hydrostatic Journal Bearing with Micropolar Lubricant

AbstractA theoretical analysis for performance characteristics of a conical multirecess hydrostatic journal bearing compensated with constant flow valve has been carried out considering micropolar lubricant. The numerical solution of the modified Reynolds equation for the conical bearing has been done using finite element method with necessary boundary conditions. The performance characteristics have been presented for various values of the restrictor design parameter, load, micropolar parameters, semi-cone angle and aspect ratio (L/D ratio) of the bearing at zero speed. It has been observed that the bearing develops large stiffness and damping coefficients with increase in restrictor design parameter, micropolar effect and semi-cone angle

IN VITRO ACCUMULATION OF CADMIUM CHLORIDE IN PAPAYA SEEDLING AND ITS IMPACT ON PLANT PROTEIN

Background: Carica papaya has wide range of applications in traditional medicine. It has high nutritional content and various medical applications. Objectives: In the present study, changes have been observed at the morphological, biochemical, antioxidation and protein level in Carica papaya L variety Pusa Dwarf by accumulation of cadmium chloride in vitro. Material and methods: Plants were treated with different concentrations (20ppm, 40ppm, 60ppm and 80ppm) of cadmium chloride, and examined changes in growth and protectively induced oxidative stress in relation to heavy metal in three weeks old seedlings. Protein profiling by SDS-PAGE was done to study the influence of severe heavy metal stress in Carica papaya L. variety Pusa Dwarf leaf and root explants. Result: Plant seedlings showed decrease in morphological characteristics like plant height, root and shoot length in response to increasing concentrations of heavy metal stress. Similarly carbohydrate content decreased in both leaves and roots while chlorophyll pigments (a+b) increased in leaf explants. Proline and polyphenolic compounds showed an increase in stressed plants compared to control. Conclusions: Plants undertake many adaptive mechanisms for their survival under metal stress which includes morphological as well as biochemical characters. Proline and polyphenolic compounds indicate the presence of excellent antioxidative ingredients to protect the induced by free radicals. Plant protein profiling supports the effect of heavy metal stress in papaya

pages) Spring

ABSTRACT The relationship between economic growth and international trade have been discussed intensively in the literature in Indian as well as at the international perspective over years, however the relationship between tourism and economic growth or international trade have not attracted much attention in the literature. This study has made an attempt to test the short-run and long-run relationships among tourism, trade and real income growth in India for the period 1996 to 2009 using quarterly data. The cointegration analysis results indicate the existence of a long-run relationship among the study variables. But we could not find any short-run relationship among the study variables in the VECM analysis, despite the significant error correction term

A Third Space Research Methodology through the Metaphor of Mokshya

In this paper we argue that research paradigms arising from the Western Modern Worldview (WMW) orients research enterprise to serve metaphysics of presence (positive evidence), propositional, deductive and analytical genre and logics (Luitel, 2003), thereby privileging knowing as misappropriating local knowledge system. When WMW fails to understand the connectedness within the local worldviews they are alike the colonization. In many researches are taken for granted to put all in boxes creating a dualism of West (colonized) and Non-west (decolonized). However, it the dualism of West and rest hardly recognizes the multiple realities of local people. At the same time I argue that valuing local ways of thinking and being is must in research methodology. In so doing I envision Third Space Methodology where we can realize the importance of both West and Rest drawing from their best practices. Developing such a methodology allows all voices to be heard but gives precedence to the Indigenous/local voice. This is why we suggest a Third Space (Mokshya- an interest of emancipation) methodology through breaking the hierarchies of West and local. We use a metaphor of Mokshyaa describing Eastern (Hindu/Baudhhist /Jain/Sikhs) epistemic view to be ware from the colonial and decolonial parameters of research. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jer.v3i2.8400 Journal of Education and Research August 2013, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 96-11