An Overture for eCAM: Science, Technology and Innovation Initiation for Prosperous, Healthy Nepal

Nepal the “Shangri-La” in the lap of the Himalayas is gearing up for modern times as it starts rebuilding after a decade of senseless violence and destruction. The nation one of the poorest in the global development index is rich in natural resources and biodiversity. Reports of medicinal plants far exceeding those recorded and reported so far are encouraging and at the same time concerns for medicinal plants under threat as a result of overexploitation are emerging from Nepal. The harsh mountain terrains, lack of industrialization and harnessing potentiality of its areas of strength; water; natural resources and tourism make it poor in per capita income which averages ~ 300 US$, with half the population living under >1$ a day. Nepal is beginning to realize that the way ahead is only possible through the path of Science and Technology (ST). Nepal Academy of Science and Technology formerly known as Royal Academy of Science and Technology organized the fifth national conference held every 4 years that took place in the capital Kathmandu during November 10-12, 2008. The ST initiation event saw the participation of ~ 1400 people representing over 150 organizations from the country and experts from abroad. The theme for the fifth national meet was “Science, Technology and Innovation for Prosperous Nepal”. Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) was an important theme in the event as the realization for the need of ST research focused in CAM for harnessing the chemo diversity potential was univocally approved

Formulation and Development of Adapalene Topical Nanohydrogel Using Different Surfactants and Cosurfactants for Antiacne Activity: In Vitro and Ex Vivo Evaluation

A formulation of an adapalene nanohydrogel (ADP-NH) using different surfactants and cosurfactants for topical application was developed and characterized. The best formulation was obtained with nanohydrogel (NH) containing Tween-80- (NH-Tween-80-) incorporated carbopol-940 and ethanol, 0.67% and 3.00% w / w , respectively. The optimized formulations of NH-Tween-80, nanohydrogel containing sodium lauryl sulphate (NH-SLS), and nanohydrogel containing glycerol (NH-glycerol) were separately evaluated to examine their in vitro and ex vivo permeability characteristics and compared with 0.3% dimethyl sulfoxide (control) solution. The polydispersity index of NH-Tween-80, NH-SLS, and NH-glycerol were found to be 0.264 ± 0.312 , 0.382 ± 0.0045 , and 0.310 ± 0.412 , respectively. All NH formulations showed pH within human skin pH ranges throughout the stability period. The NH-Tween-80 revealed 191.22 μg/mL of ADP permeation through Strat-M® membrane which was statistically significant ( p &lt; 0.05 ) compared to NH-SLS, NH-glycerol, and control solution. At 24 h, NH-Tween-80 demonstrated 305.11 μg/mL of ADP permeation in Wistar rat abdominal skin which was 1.99-, 1.56-, and 4.89-fold higher in comparison with NH-SLS, NH-glycerol, and control solution, respectively. Moreover, the ex vivo permeability of NH-Tween-80 was also compared with conventional gel (market sample) which was 3.38-fold greater at 24 h. During the 6th month of accelerated stability analysis, the NH-Tween-80, NH-SLS, and NH-glycerol demonstrated 99.25 % ± 0.15 , 91.23 % ± 0.41 , and 96.08 % ± 0.20 drug content, respectively. There were no noticeable physical changes observed up to 6 months for NH-Tween-80, while color change was observed in the 1st month and 3rd month of accelerated stability samples of NH-SLS and NH-glycerol, respectively. In this study, only NH-Tween-80 was considered both physically and chemically stable formulation. Therefore, it was concluded that the topical application of ADP-NH containing Tween-80 could be a very promising alternative for the treatment of acne vulgaris.</jats:p

Enhancing the knowledge level of dog owners using an electronic self-learning module

The present study was taken up to assess the knowledge about dog health and management among the pet owners and the effectiveness of a need based electronic self learning module “Dog Health Management Trainer” (DHMT) for enhancing their knowledge. The DHMT was developed and tested on 100 dog owners visiting the polyclinic at IVRI. Results revealed that dog owners were mainly facing problems related to diseases of skin, gastrointestinal system and parvoviral infection besides various other problems. Majority of the owners had medium knowledge about dog diseases while low knowledge about dog breeding and reproduction. Results revealed that DHMT was highly effective in enhancing the knowledge level and dog owners found it very much interesting and user friendly with an overall utility index of 0.87. The price proposed was negatively and significantly correlated with the pre-test knowledge scores for dog health indicating that those dog owners who were having low knowledge quoted higher price for procuring the DHMT

Child mortality from solid-fuel use in India: a nationally-representative case-control study

Abstract Background Most households in low and middle income countries, including in India, use solid fuels (coal/coke/lignite, firewood, dung, and crop residue) for cooking and heating. Such fuels increase child mortality, chiefly from acute respiratory infection. There are, however, few direct estimates of the impact of solid fuel on child mortality in India. Methods We compared household solid fuel use in 1998 between 6790 child deaths, from all causes, in the previous year and 609 601 living children living in 1.1 million nationally-representative homes in India. Analyses were stratified by child's gender, age (neonatal, post-neonatal, 1-4 years) and colder versus warmer states. We also examined the association of solid fuel to non-fatal pneumonias. Results Solid fuel use was very common (87% in households with child deaths and 77% in households with living children). After adjustment for demographic factors and living conditions, solid-fuel use significantly increase child deaths at ages 1-4 (prevalence ratio (PR) boys: 1.30, 95%CI 1.08-1.56; girls: 1.33, 95%CI 1.12-1.58). More girls than boys died from exposure to solid fuels. Solid fuel use was also associated with non-fatal pneumonia (boys: PR 1.54 95%CI 1.01-2.35; girls: PR 1.94 95%CI 1.13-3.33). Conclusions Child mortality risks, from all causes, due to solid fuel exposure were lower than previously, but as exposure was common solid, fuel caused 6% of all deaths at ages 0-4, 20% of deaths at ages 1-4 or 128 000 child deaths in India in 2004. Solid fuel use has declined only modestly in the last decade. Aside from reducing exposure, complementary strategies such as immunization and treatment could also reduce child mortality from acute respiratory infections

Revisiting Low Resource Status of Indian Languages in Machine Translation

Indian language machine translation performance is hampered due to the lack of large scale multi-lingual sentence aligned corpora and robust benchmarks. Through this paper, we provide and analyse an automated framework to obtain such a corpus for Indian language neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Our pipeline consists of a baseline NMT system, a retrieval module, and an alignment module that is used to work with publicly available websites such as press releases by the government. The main contribution towards this effort is to obtain an incremental method that uses the above pipeline to iteratively improve the size of the corpus as well as improve each of the components of our system. Through our work, we also evaluate the design choices such as the choice of pivoting language and the effect of iterative incremental increase in corpus size. Our work in addition to providing an automated framework also results in generating a relatively larger corpus as compared to existing corpora that are available for Indian languages. This corpus helps us obtain substantially improved results on the publicly available WAT evaluation benchmark and other standard evaluation benchmarks.Comment: 10 pages, few figures, Preprint under revie