Evaluating substance use in an urbanizing town of mid hills of Northern India

Background: Substance use is emerging as a major cause of morbidity and mortality across the world. Solan, a fast urbanizing town of India has witnessed mushrooming of industries and educational institutes. A surge in the persons booked under the Narcotic Drug and Psychoactive Substance Act 1985 led us to look into the determinants of the substance use in this region.Methods: We undertook a cross sectional study of one year secondary data analysis of 750 substance users screened at the de-addiction centre of Solan Hospital. The data mining was done by the cluster analysis technique. SPSS 16 and STATA 13 software were employed.Results: Mean age of users was 31 years with dominance of males (89.20 %), two third of total users were married, 75% were unemployed, 42% had upper school level education. About 60 and 38% were using cannabis and chitta (a synthetic opioid) respectively. Only 2% were consuming tobacco and alcohol. 62% of substance users had the fear of legal action and 44% had no family history of substance use. 39% had only single parent, 54% had started substance use under peer pressure and duration of use varied between 6 to 24 months.  Alcohol and cannabis were used more in urban and rural areas respectively. 63 and 70% had family history and experience of peer pressure respectively.Conclusions: Cluster analysis has generated substance specific socio-demographic determinants of substance use which would help in planning appropriate substance use alleviation strategies.

Traffic Engineering in Software Defined Networks: A Survey, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2016, nr 4

An important technique to optimize a network and improve network robustness is traffic engineering. As traffic demand increases, traffic engineering can reduce servicedegradation and failure in the network. To allow a network to adapt to changes in the traffic pattern, the research community proposed several traffic engineering techniques for the traditional networking architecture. However, the traditional network architecture is difficult to manage. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking model, which decouples the control plane and data plane of the networking devices. It promises to simplify network management, introduces network programmability, and provides a global view of network state. To exploit the potential of SDN, new traffic engineering methods are required. This paper surveys the state of the art in traffic engineering techniques with an emphasis on traffic engineering for SDN. It focuses on some of the traffic engineering methods for the traditional network architecture and the lessons that can be learned from them for better traffic engineering methods for SDN-based networks. This paper also explores the research challenges and futuredirections for SDN traffic engineering solutions

Nations within a nation: variations in epidemiological transition across the states of India, 1990–2016 in the Global Burden of Disease Study

18% of the world's population lives in India, and many states of India have populations similar to those of large countries. Action to effectively improve population health in India requires availability of reliable and comprehensive state-level estimates of disease burden and risk factors over time. Such comprehensive estimates have not been available so far for all major diseases and risk factors. Thus, we aimed to estimate the disease burden and risk factors in every state of India as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study 2016

QoS Aware Service Scheduling Scheme for VANETs

People immediately want to access the required data in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). They provide the requests to road side unit (RSU) while travelling. The job of RSU is to handle various requests in such a way so that the service ratio and the quality of service (QoS) is optimized. In this paper we present a mechanism to achieve this goal. Our proposed algorithm considers both data size and deadline and optimizes uploading/downloading based on number of requests to be handled. It also deals with the impact of missed upload operations to achieve maximum optimization. The proposed scheme categorizes data into two classes to assign weight according to their effect on QoS and assigns priorities to upload and download requests while maintaining common queue for both upload and download requests. Simulation results corroborate that the proposed algorithm provides better service ratio and QoS than existing techniques

Sdn-Based Mobility Management And Qos Support For Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Along with non-safety related applications, traffic safety is the major concern of the Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). However, the mobility management due to the high speed of vehicles, intermittent connectivity, and frequent topology variations are some of the crucial roadblocks. These challenges impose setback for quality of service (QoS) guarantee that leads to unfulfilled goals of VANETs deployment. The centralized control of the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm allows optimum utilization of global network view to meet the QoS requirements. Furthermore, by a systematic design of the SDN control plane, the issues of mobility management and poor network connectivity can also be addressed in an efficient manner. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based architecture that utilizes cloud computing and deals with inherent constraints of VANETs. A logically distributed control plane is devised for seamless connectivity, mobility management, and QoS support. The proposed model achieves optimum performance and robustness against failures by harnessing capabilities of SDN and cloud computing. We implemented the QoS and routing applications to evaluate the proposed model. The comparative experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework

A Scalable Peer-To-Peer Control Plane Architecture For Software Defined Networks

Control plane scalability is one of the major concerns in Software Defined Networking (SDN) deployment. Although the centralization of the control plane by decoupling it from the data plane facilitates ease of network management, however, it introduces new challenges. One of these challenges is to maintain performance, consistency, and scalability while minimizing the corresponding overheads. In this paper, we propose an architecture that allows the control plane to evolve at a hyper-scale level as well as address important performance and reliability issues. A hierarchical control plane architecture with peer-to-peer communication among logically distributed controllers is designed with the goal of achieving optimum performance and consistency gains while mitigating overheads. A root controller is deployed at the top layer of the hierarchy to maintain global network view. The proposed model is helpful in improving network robustness against failures and supporting a desired level of reliability. To evaluate our model, we developed a realistic emulation platform using ONOS, FlowVisor, Mininet, and Open vSwitch. The proposed architecture is compared with earlier solutions and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model

Deciphering the binding modes of hematoporphyrin to bovine serum albumin

175-187Interaction of proteins with small molecules is important in understanding delivery and transport of different therapeutic agents, including drugs. In the present study, we investigated the interaction between hematoporphyrin (HP), the principal component of photosensitizing drug with bovine serum albumin (BSA) in aqueous buffer solution using UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy and fluorescence measurements. The results were further substantiated by molecular docking and molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Our results revealed that fluorescence of BSA was dominantly quenched by the ground-state complex formation with HP accompanied by the electronic energy transfer (EET) to the later. We experimentally determined the thermodynamic parameters such as G0, H0, and S0 for the HP-BSA system which were -35.5 kJ mole-1,  -56.4 kJ mole-1 and -0.06 kJ mole-1 K-1, respectively. These parameters suggested hydrogen-bonding and Van der Waals forces playing major role in the complexation. This was also supported by the binding energy parameters calculated by molecular docking. Moreover, the experimentally determined G0 nicely correlated with those determined by molecular docking and MD-simulation. Further, computational results clearly showed that the binding of HP with BSA in the subdomains IB and IIA. </span

SARS-CoV-2 Reinfection Rate and Estimated Effectiveness of the Inactivated Whole Virion Vaccine BBV152 Against Reinfection Among Health Care Workers in New Delhi, India

A surge of COVID-19 occurred from March to June 2021, in New Delhi, India, linked to the B.1.617.2 (Delta) variant of SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out for health care workers (HCWs) starting in January 2021. To assess the incidence density of reinfection among a cohort of HCWs and estimate the effectiveness of the inactivated whole virion vaccine BBV152 against reinfection. This was a retrospective cohort study among HCWs working at a tertiary care center in New Delhi, India. Vaccination with 0, 1, or 2 doses of BBV152. The HCWs were categorized as fully vaccinated (with 2 doses and ≥15 days after the second dose), partially vaccinated (with 1 dose or 2 doses with <15 days after the second dose), or unvaccinated. The incidence density of COVID-19 reinfection per 100 person-years was computed, and events from March 3, 2020, to June 18, 2021, were included for analysis. Unadjusted and adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) were estimated using a Cox proportional hazards model. Estimated vaccine effectiveness (1 - adjusted HR) was reported. Among 15 244 HCWs who participated in the study, 4978 (32.7%) were diagnosed with COVID-19. The mean (SD) age was 36.6 (10.3) years, and 55.0% were male. The reinfection incidence density was 7.26 (95% CI: 6.09-8.66) per 100 person-years (124 HCWs [2.5%], total person follow-up period of 1696 person-years as time at risk). Fully vaccinated HCWs had lower risk of reinfection (HR, 0.14 [95% CI, 0.08-0.23]), symptomatic reinfection (HR, 0.13 [95% CI, 0.07-0.24]), and asymptomatic reinfection (HR, 0.16 [95% CI, 0.05-0.53]) compared with unvaccinated HCWs. Accordingly, among the 3 vaccine categories, reinfection was observed in 60 of 472 (12.7%) of unvaccinated (incidence density, 18.05 per 100 person-years; 95% CI, 14.02-23.25), 39 of 356 (11.0%) of partially vaccinated (incidence density 15.62 per 100 person-years; 95% CI, 11.42-21.38), and 17 of 1089 (1.6%) fully vaccinated (incidence density 2.18 per 100 person-years; 95% CI, 1.35-3.51) HCWs. The estimated effectiveness of BBV152 against reinfection was 86% (95% CI, 77%-92%); symptomatic reinfection, 87% (95% CI, 76%-93%); and asymptomatic reinfection, 84% (95% CI, 47%-95%) among fully vaccinated HCWs. Partial vaccination was not associated with reduced risk of reinfection. These findings suggest that BBV152 was associated with protection against both symptomatic and asymptomatic reinfection in HCWs after a complete vaccination schedule, when the predominant circulating variant was B.1.617.2