Depot-medroxy progesterone acetate as contraceptive: study at tertiary care centre

Background: The aim was to study the acceptability, efficacy and side effects of Depot-medroxy progesterone acetate (DMPA) as contraceptive in postpartum, interval and postabortal period.Methods: The present study was a prospective longitudinal study conducted in the department of obstetrics and gynaecology, GSVM medical college, Kanpur. Total 300 patients were counselled out of which 141 enrolled in the study during a period of January 2019 to September 2020. All reproductive age group (18-45) women who were willing to use DMPA for contraception in postpartum period, postabortal period or in interval period and also ready for follow up were included in the study. At the time of 1st dose DMPA card issued to patient where her particulars, weight, blood pressure, menstrual complaints were recorded. Date of next visit was also mentioned.Results: Despite of benefits and proper counselling, less number of patients (47%) opted for DMPA as contraception. Acceptance (55%) and continuation rate for further doses (36.3% for 4th dose) was maximum in the postpartum period among the three groups taken in our study (postpartum, interval and postabortal). Menstrual changes were the most common reasons for discontinuation (39.7%) in all three groups. Other minor side effects may include change in weight and mood swings.Conclusions: When patients were counselled immediately after delivery, many of them gave positive note, but actual time of application is after 6 weeks postpartum where less number of patients turned up for DMPA. There is a need to create awareness regarding the harmless side effects

Knowledge, attitudes and practice among healthcare workers towards COVID-19 in a tertiary care centre in north India

Background: Coronavirus disease pandemic has affected the entire world and till date, there is no definitive cure for it with prevention of infection and knowledge about the disease being the only proven effective methods to contain it. Healthcare workers (HCWs) are highly susceptible to getting infected and their knowledge about COVID-19 infection has been known to be inversely proportional to the rates of COVID-19 infection. Methods: Cross-sectional questionnaire-based study assessing knowledge, attitude and practices towards COVID-19 preventive measures was carried out amongst HCWs at a tertiary care hospital in North India. Results: Around 95% of HCWs had received training regarding COVID-19 infection and more than 95% HCWs had adequate knowledge about COVID-19 infection. More than 95% HCWs experienced anxiety and fear while monitoring and treating COVID-19 patients. 85% HCWs felt that there is sufficient awareness in the society regarding COVID-19 infection. Most of the respondents followed correct practices for avoidance of COVID-19 infection with around 90% respondents using face masks and practicing frequent hand washing. Social distancing and avoidance of large gatherings was practiced by around 95% respondents. More than 95% respondents had either taken COVID-19 vaccine or wish to take it. Conclusions: The study suggested that the majority of HCWs had good knowledge and positive attitude toward COVID-19 but there are still some lacunae present in the knowledge regarding prevention of COVID 19 infection. Further education and training are required for HCWs so as to fight COVID and prevent its spread in a better way

Personal Hygiene and Self-Reported Handwashing Practices among Food Handlers of a Medical College in Delhi

Introduction: Food handlers play a major role in ensuring food safety as mishandling and disregard for personal hygiene on their part may result in food borne- illness outbreaks.Methodology: Cross sectional observational study involving about 44 food handlers presently working were included. With structured proforma, details of socio- demographic data and self reported personal hygiene and handwashing practices were carried out. Results: Majority of the study subjects had satisfactory or good personal hygiene. Significantly greater number of study subjects working as servers or helpers had a better status of hygiene as compared to the cooks. Personal income was significantly associated with the status of personal hygiene of the study subjects. Although majority of them were using soap for handwashing after defecation and micturition but only few were using it at the workplace. Although all of them were brushing/ cleaning their teeth, 50% were doing it only once in a day. Majority of them were taking bath in summers while 9% were not taking bath in winters. Majority of them were trimming their nails on a regular basis while 2.3% didn’t cut their nails at all. Majority of them used to take medicine during diarrhea while only 2.3% used to take leave from work during illness. Most of them reported using towel to wipe the sweat. Most of them either covered their mouth or turned their face away from food while coughing/ sneezing. While 56.8% reported that they chased the stray animal, 20.4% said that animals never entered the premises, 2.3% had the habit of offering food to them.Conclusion: There is a lot of scope for improving the standards of personal hygiene practices of food handlers. Important personal hygiene habits that help in prevention of contamination of food should be included in the content of health education sessions

Feto maternal outcomes with mullerian anomalies

Congenital anomalies of female reproductive tract may involve the uterus, cervix, or vagina arise from defect in development of Mullerian ducts during fetal life. In mullerian anomalies various types of uterine anomalies are common. Many cases with Mullerian anomalies remain unidentified especially if patient is asymptomatic. They are often associated with obstetric complications like malpresentation, PPROM and preterm delivery. Hence we are presenting a case series to summarize the fetomaternal outcomes with mullerian anomalies

Orca: FSS-based Secure Training with GPUs

Secure Two-party Computation (2PC) allows two parties to compute any function on their private inputs without revealing their inputs in the clear to each other. Since 2PC is known to have notoriously high overheads, one of the most popular computation models is that of 2PC with a trusted dealer, where a trusted dealer provides correlated randomness (independent of any input) to both parties during a preprocessing phase. Recent works construct efficient 2PC protocols in this model based on the cryptographic technique of function secret sharing (FSS). We build an end-to-end system Orca to accelerate the computation of FSS-based 2PC protocols with GPUs. Next, we observe that the main performance bottleneck in such accelerated protocols is in storage (due to the large amount of correlated randomness), and we design new FSS-based 2PC cryptographic protocols for several key functionalities in ML which reduce storage by up to $5\times$. Compared to prior state-of-the-art on secure training accelerated with GPUs in the same computation model (Piranha, Usenix Security 2022), we show that Orca has $4\%$ higher accuracy, $123\times$ lesser communication, and is $19\times$ faster on CIFAR-10

Micropropagation And Antimicrobial Activity Of Callicarpa Macrophylla (Priyangu) Against Medically Important Pathogens

Callicarpa macrophylla (Priyangu) a medicinally important plant, represents a class of herbal drug with very strong conceptual and traditional base. In present study extract of leaf, stem showed less antimicrobial activity than seed. They showed antimicrobial activity against three bacterial strains Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus subtilis, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas and three fungal Strains Aspergillus fumigatous, Rhizopus oryzae and Aspergillus awamori. Maximum activity was observed in ethanol extract of leaf and stem, Methanol extracts of seed. Phytochemical analysis of the plant extract revealed the presence of phenol, reducing sugar, coumarin and saponins.  Micropropogation of C.macrophylla was done using stem as a explant material on MS and Woody media. Which revealed that woody media containing BAP (6-amino benzyl purine) NAA(α-napthaleneacetic acid) gave maximum proliferation  response in comparison to MS media. Plant extract (leave, stem and seed) have provide protection against RBC haemolysis and protein denaturation may act as anti-arthritic agent. We propose antiarthritic and antimicrobial activity of C.macrophylla

Antioxidant capacity and combinatorial antimicrobial effects of Nardostachys jatamansi essential oil with conventional antibiotics against some drug resistant bacteria

The antibacterial and antioxidant properties of essential oils (EOs) have long been recognized. The present study was conducted to investigate the antioxidant capability of Nardostachys jatamansi essential oil and to see if it has a synergistic antimicrobial effect with antibiotics against two Gram negative (Klebsiella pneumoniae and Escherichia coli) and three Gram positive (Bacillus subtilis, Micrococcus luteus and Staphylococcus aureus) bacterial strains. Guaia-6,9-diene (11.96 %), calarene (10.44 %), jatamansone (8.11 %), α-gurjunene (7.42 %), valencene (6.46 %), α-maaliene (5.24 %), sprojatamol (5.06 %), and caratol (5.06 %) were found to be the primary components of N. jatamansi EO. According to antioxidant studies, N. jatamansi EO has moderate DPPH radical scavenging activity, reducing power, and ferric reducing antioxidant power. Similarly, N. jatamansi EO also showed significant antibacterial activity, with inhibition zones, MIC, and MBC values ranging from 10.5 ± 0.5 to 14.0 ± 0.4 mm, 1.5 to 3.1 mg/mL, and 1.8 to 3.5 mg/mL respectively. The results of N. jatamansi EO interactions with conventional antibiotics revealed that amoxicillin, erythromycin, chloramphenicol, and ampicillin MICs were reduced by 5 to 10 fold, 4 to 9.09 fold, 4 to 10.5 fold, and 4 to 8.0 fold, respectively. The findings of this study are noteworthy because no previous reports of N. jatamansi EO's synergistic interaction with conventional antibiotics have been published, and therefore may constitute an important strategy for addressing problem of drug resistant bacteria

SIGMA: Secure GPT Inference with Function Secret Sharing

Secure 2-party computation (2PC) enables secure inference that offers protection for both proprietary machine learning (ML) models and sensitive inputs to them. However, the existing secure inference solutions suffer from high latency and communication overheads, particularly for transformers. Function secret sharing (FSS) is a recent paradigm for obtaining efficient 2PC protocols with a preprocessing phase. We provide SIGMA, the first end-to-end system for secure transformer inference based on FSS. By constructing new FSS-based protocols for complex machine learning functionalities, such as Softmax and GeLU, and also accelerating their computation on GPUs, SIGMA improves the latency of secure inference of transformers by $11-19\times$ over the state-of-the-art that uses preprocessing and GPUs. We present the first secure inference of generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models. In particular, SIGMA executes GPT-Neo with 1.3 billion parameters in 7.4s and HuggingFace\u27s GPT2 in 1.6s