Hand hygiene compliance among healthcare workers in a tertiary care academic health care organization

Background: Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs) are a major cause of high morbidity, disability, mortality and rising costs for health systems. Preventing the HAI risk by planning and implementing effective preventive strategies is important to safeguard patient health. Handwashing is one of the fundamental measures for preventing transmission of hospital-acquired infections.Methods: This cross-sectional observational study was conducted in the surgical ICU from January to February 2018 to evaluate the presence of adhesion to the different aspects of HH. Inclusion criteria included all nurses and allied healthcare workers of surgical ICU while all other HCWs were excluded. Two observers collected all HH data. During this analysis, 3000 HH opportunities were observed. HH compliance was tested for all 5 moments as per WHO guidelines. Data thus collected were entered into a computer-based spreadsheet for analysis using SPSS statistical software (version 20) (IBM Corp., NY, USA).Results: Overall hand hygiene compliance observed as per WHO Guidelines was 79.8%. Nurses had an adherence rate of 77.8%; allied staff adherence was 81.8%. Nurses’ compliance after touching patient surroundings was lowest at 60.7%. 96% staff was aware of the facts like diseases prevented by hand washing, ideal duration of HH, reduction of health care associated infections.Conclusions: Overall, the involved ICUs showed low levels of adherence to best hygiene practices with overall compliance of 79.2%. This suggests the need to implement immediate strategies for infection control in the ICUs. A multidisciplinary intervention could be effective in preventing and control the HAI risk

Investigation of Anti- Pyretic Activity of Cinnamon Oil in Wistar Rat

The current exploration work was to explore the antipyretic movement of cinnamon oil (25 Milligram/ kilogram or 50 Milligram/ kilogram p.o). The antipyretic movement was assessed against Brewer\u27s yeast and lipopolysaccharides instigated pyrexia in rodents. In case of lipopolysaccharides instigated pyrexia (50 mg/kg,  p.o) is more effective comparison to 25 Milligram/ kilogram. But in case of Brewer\u27s yeast induced pyrexia both low and high dose is more effective of cinnamon oil (25 mg/kg or 50 Milligram/ kilogram p.o) suppress anal temperature significantly 96.42 ± 0.009 and 95.40 ± 0.000 respectively in Brewer’s yeast instigated pyrexia. The exploration result shows that cinnamon oil (25 Milligram/ kilogram or 50 Milligram/ kilogram, p.o) is having a huge enemy of antipyretic potential

Ear Identification by Fusion of Segmented Slice Regions using Invariant Features: An Experimental Manifold with Dual Fusion Approach

This paper proposes a robust ear identification system which is developed by fusing SIFT features of color segmented slice regions of an ear. The proposed ear identification method makes use of Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to build ear model with mixture of Gaussian using vector quantization algorithm and K-L divergence is applied to the GMM framework for recording the color similarity in the specified ranges by comparing color similarity between a pair of reference ear and probe ear. SIFT features are then detected and extracted from each color slice region as a part of invariant feature extraction. The extracted keypoints are then fused separately by the two fusion approaches, namely concatenation and the Dempster-Shafer theory. Finally, the fusion approaches generate two independent augmented feature vectors which are used for identification of individuals separately. The proposed identification technique is tested on IIT Kanpur ear database of 400 individuals and is found to achieve 98.25% accuracy for identification while top 5 matched criteria is set for each subject.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure