Emerging challenges and health system capacity: the case of non- communicable diseases in Pakistan; a review

Background: Pakistan is facing double burden of disease and the contribution of mortality by non-communicable diseases has over numbered the communicable diseases. The focus of health system of Pakistan is inclined more towards communicable disease and maternal & child health. Therefore, there is a need to review health policy, health sector budgeting and health setup in order to meet the needs of healthcare in context of non-communicable disease. Objective: To review the health system capacity to manage the emerging challenge of non-communicable diseases in Pakistan. Methodology: A thorough literature search on PubMed and Google Scholar was done. Reports from W.H.O, other national and international organizations and government & non-government policy papers were also reviewed. We used following search terms; Non Communicable Disease, Health system capacity, Pakistan. Results: Several health system issues emerged through the review of the health system capacity for NCDs. These included lack of political commitment, services more focused on communicable disease and MNCH, inadequate human resources, lack of inter-sectoral approach, insufficient funding opportunities and fragmented health system. These issues can be addressed through government support for combating burden of NCDs, provision of services for NCD at PHC level, human resource training regarding NCDs and integrated care system. Finance should be allocated for NCDs and existing HMIS should also be used for utilizing information regarding NCDs. Conclusion: Health systems framework to NCD means in summary re-examining the planning and organization of the entire health system, from service provision to financing, from information generation to ensuring adequate supply of pharmaceuticals/technologies or human resources, from improving facility management to performance monitoring

MPJ Express meets YARN:towards Java HPC on Hadoop systems

AbstractMany organizations—including academic, research, commercial institutions—have invested heavily in setting up High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities for running computational science applications. On the other hand, the Apache Hadoop software—after emerging in 2005— has become a popular, reliable, and scalable open-source framework for processing large-scale data (Big Data). Realizing the importance and significance of Big Data, an increasing number of organizations are investing in relatively cheaper Hadoop clusters for executing their mission critical data processing applications. An issue here is that system administrators at these sites might have to maintain two parallel facilities for running HPC and Hadoop computations. This, of course, is not ideal due to redundant maintenance work and poor economics. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by allowing HPC and Hadoop jobs to co-exist on a single hardware facility. We achieve this goal by exploiting YARN—Hadoop v2.0—that de-couples the computational and resource scheduling part of the Hadoop framework from HDFS. In this context, we have developed a YARN-based reference runtime system for the MPJ Express software that allows executing parallel MPI-like Java applications on Hadoop clusters. The main contribution of this paper is provide Big Data community access to MPI-like programming using MPJ Express. As an aside, this work allows parallel Java applications to perform computations on data stored in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

using management information system to evaluate quality of care at tertiary care hospital’s stroke centre

To find out the average length of stay, the rate of I/V catheter cellulites, the rate of bed sores among patients in stroke centre and determine the mortality rates. Methodology: This is a descriptive study, carried out at a tertiary care hospital over the period of six months. Data was analyzed by SPSS version 15.0. Result: Total numbers of patients were 36 from January 1 to June 30, 2007 at Stroke Center Liaquat National Hospital. The mean length of stay was 8.17 ±5.81 days. Patients had cellulitis (intravenous) 97.2%, only 2.8% of patients did not develop. The rate of bed sore was 41.7%. Conclusion: By effective implementation of the Management Information System (MIS) in health care delivery system we can find patients clinical issues and can reduce their length of stay

Genes that underlie natural variation in growth rate and flowering time in local accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana

Growth rate and flowering time are agriculturally important traits that are linked to fitness, productivity and reproductive success of plants. To study the genetic basis for natural variation in growth rate and flowering time between local accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana, hybrids were produced between fast growing / late flowering and slow growing / early flowering parents. F3 and F5 hybrid families were grown under a range of conditions – under a constant controlled environment, outside over the winter and outside in spring and early summer. Growth rates were estimated from repeated images of rosettes. Flowering time, as number of leaves to flower, was also recorded both in control and natural conditions for F5 lines. Damage by slugs and stress-induced production of anthocyanin pigments were also recorded for plants grown outside. Broad-sense heritability estimates were higher for F5 families than F3, in which more loci will segregate, and ranged from 48% to 89%. No significant correlation between growth rates under different environments was observed in most cases for F3 populations, however significant correlations were detected for F5 families outside and under controlled conditions, suggesting that same genes can affect growth rate in more than one environment. The genotypes of F3 families were determined at thirty-nine SSLP (simple sequence length polymorphism) loci and used in regression with phenotype data to search for quantitative trait loci (QTL). Significant QTLs were detected in F3 families for growth rate, flowering time and anthocyanin production, but not for herbivore damage. To confirm QTL detected in the F3 and to detect additional loci, bulk segregant analysis was carried out in F5 families grown under different conditions. Potentially linked markers were tested further in individual F5 plants and QTL mapped on a finer scale in F5 families that remained heterozygous for candidate regions. VIP5 and LDL1 were selected as potential candidate genes for flowering time variation. These genes were sequenced for two parental alleles. A transposon insertion and 5’ UTR deletion were found in the LDL1 allele from the late flowering parent and SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) were observed throughout the gene. However both alleles appeared to be expressed at similar levels. Transgenic lines have been produced carrying the LDL1 allele from the early flowering parent (4D1) in the background of the later flowering parent (11C1). This work is on-going and will hopefully reveal whether LDL1 underlies differences in flowering behaviour seen between 11C1 and 4D1