Management of Blood Transfusion Services in India: An Illustrative Study of Maharashtra and Gujarat States

Blood is a vital healthcare resource routinely used in a broad range of hospital procedures. It is also a potential vector for harmful, and sometimes fatal, infectious diseases such as HIV, HBV, and HCV. Morbidity and mortality resulting from the transfusion of infected blood have far-reaching consequences. The economic cost of a failure to control the transmission of infection is visible in countries with a high prevalence of HIV. Shortfalls in blood supply have a particular impact on women with pregnancy complications, trauma victims and children with severe life-threatening anaemia. Ensuring a safe, source and ethical supply of blood and blood products and rational clinical use of blood are important public health responsibilities of every national government. Blood transfusion services in India rely on very fragmented mix of competing independent and hospital based blood banks of different levels of sophistication, serving different types of hospitals and patients. Voluntary and non-remunerated blood is in short supply. The SACS ensure only the availability of safe blood in blood banks. Clinical use of blood is not monitored, and the use of blood components is very low. Managing blood transfusion services involves donor management, blood collection, testing, processing, storing, issue of safe blood and blood products when clinically needed, and staff training. Maharashtra Government, by setting up its State Blood Transfusion Council as an independent unit under the Department of Health, has set up an excellent example to address the above managerial issues in meeting the transfusion requirements than any fragmented system. We strongly recommend the Maharashtra model to all other states and union territories in India.

X-Ray Fluoresence Spectrometry in Geological Samples

Geological samples comprising of various rocks, ores and minerals need to be studied for their elemental chemical data. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry is a precise and accurate analytical technique for determining elements from atomic No.4 (boron) to 92 (uranium) at concentration levels of 100% to a few parts per million (ppm) in solids, liquids and powders. The non-destructive nature of anal- ysis, speed, versatility, automation, sensitivity, sele-ctivity, large sample throughput have made XRF technique a widely practised and well established technique for the determination of major, minor and trace elements in rock samples

Petrology and physical conditions of metamorphism of calcsilicate rocks from low- to high-grade transition area, Dharmapuri District, Tamil Nadu

Calc-silicate rocks comprising quartz, plagioclase, diopside, sphene, scapolite, grossularite-andradite and wollastonite occur as lensoid enclaves within the greasy migmatitic and charnockitic gneisses of the Archaean amphibolite- to granulite-facies transition zone in Dharmapuri district, Tamil Nadu. The calc-silicate rocks are characterized by the absence of K-feldspar and primary calcite, presence of large modal quartz and plagioclase and formation of secondary garnet and zoisite rims around scapolite and wollastonite. The mineral distributions suggest compositional layering. The chemical composition and mineralogy of the calc-silicate rocks indicate that they were derived from impure silica-rich calcareous sediments whose composition is similar to that of pelite-limestone mixtures. From the mineral assemblages the temperature, pressure and fluid composition during metamorphism were estimated. The observed mineral reaction sequences require a range of X sub CO2 values demonstrating that an initially CO2-rich metamorphic fluid evolved with time towards considerably more H2O-rich compositions. These variations in fluid composition suggest that there were sources of water-rich fluids external to the calc-silicate rocks and that mixing of these fluids with those of calc-silicate rocks was important in controlling fluid composition in calc-silicate rocks and some adjacent rock types as well

A Monte Carlo Simulation of Polyethylene Chain

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Simultaneous approximation for the Phillips operators

We study the simultaneous approximation properties of the well-known Phillips operators. We establish the rate of convergence of the Phillips operators in simultaneous approximation by means of the decomposition technique for functions of bounded variation

Exclusive light particle measurements for the system 19^{19}F + 12^{12}C at 96 MeV

Decay sequence of hot {31}^P nucleus has been investigated through exclusive light charged particle measurements in coincidence with individual evaporation residues using the reaction {19}^F (96 MeV) + {12}^C. Information on the sequential decay chain have been extracted by confronting the data with the predictions of the statistical model. It is observed from the present analysis that such exclusive light charged particle data may be used as a powerful tool to probe the decay sequence of the hot light compound systems.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, Physical Review C (in press

Confinement and electron correlation effects in photoionization of atoms in endohedral anions: Ne@C60^{z-}

Trends in resonances, termed confinement resonances, in photoionization of atoms A in endohedral fullerene anions A@C60^{z-} are theoretically studied and exemplified by the photoionization of Ne in Ne@C{60}^{z-}. Remarkably, above a particular nl ionization threshold of Ne in neutral Ne@C60 (I_{nl}^{z=0}), confinement resonances in corresponding partial photoionization cross sections sigma_{nl} of Ne in any charged Ne@C60^{z-} remain almost intact by a charge z on the carbon cage, as a general phenomenon. At lower photon energies, omega < I_{nl}^{z=0}, the corresponding photoionization cross sections develop additional, strong, z-dependent resonances, termed Coulomb confinement resonances, as a general occurrence. Furthermore, near the innermost 1s ionization threshold, the 2p photoionization cross section sigma_{2p} of the outermost 2p subshell of thus confined Ne is found to inherit the confinement resonance structure of the 1s photoionization spectrum, via interchannel coupling. As a result, new confinement resonances emerge in the 2p photoionization cross section of the confined Ne atom at photoelectron energies which exceed the 2p threshold by about a thousand eV, i.e., far above where conventional wisdom said they would exist. Thus, the general possibility for confinement resonances to resurrect in photoionization spectra of encapsulated atoms far above thresholds is revealed, as an interesting novel general phenomenon.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, Latex2e, jpconf.cls styl

On the location of the zeros of analytic functions

In this paper we obtain regions containing all the zeros of a class of analytic functions whose coefficients are subject to certain conditions. Our results sharpen some of the results known in this direction. Also we give some examples to show that in some cases the regions obtained by our results are considerably sharper than the regions obtained by known results

Interpolation of natural cubic spline

From the result in [1] it follows that there is a unique quadratic spline which bounds the same area as that of the function. The matching of the area for the cubic spline does not follow from the corresponding result proved in [2]. We obtain cubic splines which preserve the area of the function