People's initiative for total sanitation

VERC was established in 1977 as a project of Save the Children-USA. In 1981, it was indigenized as a private voluntary development organization. Its vision is "A self­reliant society based on justice, equity and sustainability where every human being has the equal opportunity to maximize theirpotentialities ". VERC has had a WATSAN program since inception and WaterAid has been funding this since 1986. Despite a lot of effort made by different stakeholders in the country, the rural WATSAN context of Bangladesh still estimates safe drinking water coverage as 97.5% while actual coverage comes down to 74% because of arsenic contamination in the ground water source. Sanitation coverage for rural areas is only 41.3 %, which in some cases goes down to 15%. Considering the situation, VERC thought of looking for a more effective approach to address the situation. Accordingly, the NGO has innovated the approach of 100% sanitation in the country during the implementation of it's Phase III project activities which started in 1999. Under the new approach, VERC has enabled 50 communities to achieve 100% sanitation cov­erage in seven sub-districts with increased access to safe water supply

A Case Study of Inventory Analysis in a Healthcare Product Manufacturing Company

A worldwide market inventory is one of the biggest and most significant resources of a manufacturing industry. ABC analysis is one of the techniques used comprehensively in manufacturing industries for inventory classification.The ABC inventory classification technique has an efficient control on a huge amount of inventory items. The ABC inventory classification approach categorizes inventory items as A, B and C classes according to their annual consumption value.To direct and control the inventory items more proficiently the inventory managers regularly classify and group all the inventory items.Thus, in this paper, we concentrate on inventory management in a healthcare product manufacturing company in Kedah, Malaysia.A case study approach is used to make a preliminary inventory assessment through ABC analysis in order to control the inventory items more efficiently

Developing a framework for an early warning system of seasonal temperature and rainfall tailored to aquaculture in Bangladesh

The occurrence of high temperature and heavy rain events during the monsoon season are a major climate risk affecting aquaculture production in Bangladesh. Despite the advances in the seasonal forecasting, the development of operational tools remains a challenge. This work presents the development of a seasonal forecasting approach to predict the number of warm days (NWD) and number of heavy rain days (NHRD) tailored to aquaculture in two locations of Bangladesh (Sylhet and Khulna). The approach is based on the use of meteorological and pond temperature data to generate linear models of the relationship between three-monthly temperature and rainfall statistics and NWD and NHRD, and on the evaluation of the skill of three operational dynamical models from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) project. The linear models were used to evaluate the forecasts for two seasons and 1-month lead time: May to July (MJJ), forecast generated in April, and August to October (ASO), forecast generated in July. Differences were observed in the skill of the models predicting maximum temperature and rainfall (Spearman correlation, Root Mean Square Error, Bias statistics, and Willmott’s Index of Agreement,), in addition to NWD and NHRD from linear models, which also vary for the target seasons and location. In general, the models show higher predictive skill for NWD than NHRD, and for Sylhet than in Khulna. Among the three evaluated NMME models, CanSIPSv2 and GFDL-SPEAR exhibit the best performance, they show similar features in terms of error metrics, but CanSIPSv2 presents a lower interannual standard deviation

Allosteric inhibition of BCR-ABL

Impaired regulation of kinase activity can lead to a variety of diseases, including cancer. Inhibition of kinase activity has, therefore, been considered an attractive anti-cancer therapeutic strategy. The success of targeted therapy with kinase inhibitors has been well documented with BCR-ABL, where imatinib specifically inhibits kinase activity with impressive pharmacological responses in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). However, the success of kinase inhibitors as cancer therapeutics is being challenged clinically by the emergence of acquired resistance. Most kinase inhibitors available today are ATP-competitive. There have been efforts to develop kinase inhibitors with new modes of action. In this review, we highlight the development of ‘allosteric kinase inhibitors’ that inhibit kinase activity by binding to a site remote from the active site of the kinase. We focus on recent efforts directed towards BCR-ABL, for which, significant progress has been made to develop allosteric inhibitors with promising therapeutic activity, especially in the context of overcoming clinically acquired resistance mutations to the first generation of ATP-competitive kinase inhibitors

Storm types in Bangladesh : duration, intensity and area of intra‐daily wet events

International audienceWe explore the characteristics of 96190 wet events (WE) defined as consecutive 3-hourly rainfall >= 1 mm/3h from a network of 34 stations across Bangladesh. Nearly 60% (5%) of wet events last = 15) hours. The WEs are dynamically clustered into four "canonical" storm types (ST), mostly discretized by their duration, but also their mean and maximal intensity. While durations, total amounts and wet contiguous areas of WEs are positively related, their mean intensity is nearly independent of them. ~ 60% of WEs are associated with ST#1, that is short and small WEs and very low rainfall amounts (usually < 10 mm), ~15% of WEs are associated with either (ST#2) short/small WEs but with intense rainfall, probably mostly related to scattered thunderstorms, or (ST#3) longer/larger WEs but with less intense rainfall. The last ST (ST#4) is rare (~ 6%), related to very long durations and large wet areas, and includes the wettest WEs. It is especially frequent over southeastern Bangladesh. ST#2 to #4 contribute almost equally to the local-scale total amount of rainfall (27-29% each in mean) while ST#1, despite its individual low rainfall amount, still includes ~ 15% of it. ST#2 (ST#4) is related to the highest probability of occurrence of 3-hourly (daily) extremes. ST#4 occurrence is the most impacted by synoptic Indian lows/depressions as well as the main modes of intraseasonal variation, while ST#1 and #2 are also significantly impacted by intraseasonal modes but in reverse manner than ST#4

Active and break spells of summer monsoon over Bangladesh

This study examines the intraseasonal variability of the southwest summer monsoon over Bangladesh using rainfall data from rain gauge stations of the Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) collected over 30 years (1988–2017). In this paper, active and break spells are defined as periods during the peak monsoon months of July and August, in which the daily precipitation lasts for three or more days at 0.5 above and below the daily climatological cycle. The active and break phases of the monsoon over a period of 10 years (2008–2017) were also analyzed by The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model simulation for analysing synoptic conditions. The model simulations for each year were done for the period of 1 May to 30 September with 1 May as the initial condition with a single domain of 30 km resolution and 19 vertical levels. The final operational global analysis data from the Global Forecasting System of National Centers for Environment Prediction (NCEP-FNL) with resolution 1° × 1° is used for model simulation. The model-simulated daily rainfall, Sea Level Pressure (SLP), wind pattern at 850 hPa, 200 hPa, and Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) are compared with the observations from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), ERA5 (ERA5 is the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts fifth-gen global atmospheric reanalysis data), and Kalpana-1. This study also finds that the increase in rainfall is concurrent with a southwesterly wind and the decrease of rainfall simultaneously occurs with a southeasterly wind. Active days were found to have lower OLR values and lower SLP than break days