Promoting urban rainwater harvesting in Dhaka, Bangladesh

With rapid population growth and Unplanned urbanisation water has turn into a scare resource in Dhaka city. This city will visage a severe water crisis to meet its increasing demand in near future. Present water supply depend on 87% groundwater extraction with groundwater table depletion at a rate of 2.81meter/year. No management initiatives revealed to protect groundwater recharging. WaterAid follows an approach to reach academics, researchers, urban planners, civil engineers, architects and policy makers for promoting rainwater harvesting through collective action. As immediate result, 4 universities adopted contents of rain water harvesting in course curricula, initiated 4 piloting researches by different institutions, urban planners and architects are engaged in construction designing to adopt rainwater harvesting, and changes adopted in the national building codes.. This paper denotes WaterAid initiatives and sign of impact to promote urban rainwater harvesting in Dhaka city

Healthy-home approach: lasting changes in hygiene behaviour in rural Bangladesh

NGOs have been struggling for over a decade in Bangladesh to bring visible changes in hygiene behaviour at the community level. However, few of these initiatives focus specifically on promoting hygiene behaviour at the practice level. Providing hygiene messages following traditional approaches achieves numeric figures, but often fails to bring real changes on the ground. WaterAid Bangladesh piloted an approach called “healthy home” under its rural programme, which encourages communities to promote safe water and sanitation through recognition and owners of “healthy home”. A wide range of stakeholders engage in the process led by local government institutions (LGIs).. Over an eight months period of time, more than 80% household owners have been awarded as healthy-home promoters against targeted numbers, and have been declared so by LGIs publicly. Recognition, dignity and ownership work as motivating factors in this process, which could be capitalised for greater achievement in other programmes

WASH 5 Star approach: addressing hygiene behaviour in schools of rural Bangladesh

Every child has basic rights to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH). School are essential institutions to children’s welfare, and a place where lifelong behaviours are inculcated. The National Hygiene Baseline Survey [1] and recent WASH bottleneck analysis of Bangladesh [2] reflected the worrying state of hygiene behaviour in schools. WaterAid Bangladesh has developed an approach called ‘WASH 5 Star’ based on the five behavioural domains articulated in the National Hygiene Promotion Strategy (NHPS) 2012 in Bangladesh [3] to raise awareness at the individual, household and institutional level on proper hygiene practices . The WASH 5 Star approach was introduced in 2500 schools in rural Bangladesh and yielded encouraging results within a short span of time. This approach can to be introduced at a large scale to achieve wider health benefits

Food and beverages promoting elderly health: six food-based dietary guidelines to plan good mixed meals for elderly South Africans

Studies have shown that the elderly are at a higher risk of developing malnutrition due to physiological and pathological changes. Several studies have confirmed that older South Africans have insufficient dietary diversity, resulting in nutritional deficiencies. Furthermore, poor and uninformed dietary choices are associated with the development of several diseases and increased mortality. Following the Elderly Food Based Dietary Guidelines (EFBDGs) related to promoting elderly health could ensure that the elderly have an adequate intake of nutritious foods. This paper provides an overview of six FBDGs relating to promoting health and is based on the South African Food Based Dietary Guidelines

Vitamin-B6 Schiff base dioxovanadium(V) complex for targeted visible light-induced anticancer activity

A dioxovanadium(V) complex of vitamin-B6 Schiff base [VO2L] (1) (where H2L·HCl is 3-hydroxy-5-(hydroxymethyl)-4-(((2-hydroxyphenyl)imino)methyl)-2-methylpyridin-1-ium chloride) has been prepared and structurally characterized. Its photo-induced cytotoxicity and mechanism of cell death has been studied. Single crystal X-ray structure shows five-coordinate square-pyramidal geometry of the complex having the dianionic O,N,O-donor tridentate vitamin-B6 Schiff base and two cis-oriented oxo ligands bound to V(V). DFT study shows the HOMO located on the amino-phenolic moiety, while the LUMO is on the protonated aromatic unit, i.e., the pyridiniumphenolate moiety. Vitamin-B6 transporting membrane carrier (VTC) pathway seems to be responsible for the higher cellular uptake and activity of the complex into the cervical HeLa and breast cancer MCF-7 cells in preference to the normal embryonic fibroblast 3T3 cells. The complex exhibits reactive oxygen species (ROS) mediated apoptotic photocytotoxicity in visible light of 400–700 nm in the cancer cells (IC50: ~16 μM), while being essentially non-toxic in the dark. Alkaline Comet assay shows damage of the nuclear DNA.

The development and validation of a scoring tool to predict the operative duration of elective laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background: The ability to accurately predict operative duration has the potential to optimise theatre efficiency and utilisation, thus reducing costs and increasing staff and patient satisfaction. With laparoscopic cholecystectomy being one of the most commonly performed procedures worldwide, a tool to predict operative duration could be extremely beneficial to healthcare organisations. Methods: Data collected from the CholeS study on patients undergoing cholecystectomy in UK and Irish hospitals between 04/2014 and 05/2014 were used to study operative duration. A multivariable binary logistic regression model was produced in order to identify significant independent predictors of long (> 90 min) operations. The resulting model was converted to a risk score, which was subsequently validated on second cohort of patients using ROC curves. Results: After exclusions, data were available for 7227 patients in the derivation (CholeS) cohort. The median operative duration was 60 min (interquartile range 45–85), with 17.7% of operations lasting longer than 90 min. Ten factors were found to be significant independent predictors of operative durations > 90 min, including ASA, age, previous surgical admissions, BMI, gallbladder wall thickness and CBD diameter. A risk score was then produced from these factors, and applied to a cohort of 2405 patients from a tertiary centre for external validation. This returned an area under the ROC curve of 0.708 (SE = 0.013, p  90 min increasing more than eightfold from 5.1 to 41.8% in the extremes of the score. Conclusion: The scoring tool produced in this study was found to be significantly predictive of long operative durations on validation in an external cohort. As such, the tool may have the potential to enable organisations to better organise theatre lists and deliver greater efficiencies in care

Synthesis, Characterization, and Growth Mechanism of Single-Walled Metal Oxide Nanotubes

Nanotubes have numerous potential applications in areas such as biotechnology, electronics, photonics, catalysis and separations. There are several challenges to be overcome in order to realize their potential, such as: (1) Synthesis of monodisperse (in diameter and in length) single-walled nanotubes; (2) Quantitative understanding of the mechanism of formation and growth of nanotubes; (3) Capability to engineer the nanotube size; (4) Low temperature synthesis process; and (5) Synthesis of impurity free nanotubes. Our investigation focuses on a class of metal oxide (aluminosilicate/germanate) nanotubes, which are; single walled nanotubes with monodisperse inner and outer diameters, can be synthesized in the laboratory by a low temperature (95ºC) process in mildly acidic aqueous solutions, and their formation timescales is hours, which makes it convenient as a model system to study the mechanisms of nanotube formation. This work is focused on obtaining a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the mechanism of formation of aluminosilicate and aluminogermanate nanotubes. In order to achieve this overall objective, this thesis consists of the following aspects: (1) A systematic phenomenological study of the growth and structural properties of aluminosilicate and aluminogermanate nanotubes. The constant size and increasing nanotube concentration over the synthesis time strongly suggest that these nanotubular are assembled through self-assembly process. (II) Investigation of the mechanism of formation of single-walled aluminogermanate nanotubes provided the central phenomena underlying the formation of these nanostructures: (1) the generation (via pH control) of a precursor solution containing chemically bonded precursors, (2) the formation of amorphous nanoscale (~ 6 nm) condensates via temperature control, and (3) the self-assembly of short nanotubes from the amorphous nanoscale condensates. (III) Synthesis of mixed metal oxide (aluminosilicogermanate) nanotubes with precise control of elemental composition, diameter and length of the product nanotubes. (IV) Preliminary work towards generalization of the kinetic model developed for aluminogermanate nanotubes to a larger class of metal oxide nanotubes. It was found that the size of nanotubes is dependent on the amount of precursors that can be packed in a single ANP and in turn depends on the size of the ANP.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Sankar Nair; Committee Member: Christopher W. Jones; Committee Member: Haskell W. Beckham; Committee Member: Peter J. Hesketh; Committee Member: William J. Koro

Aiming at Optimization of Tracking Technology through Seasonally Tilted Sun Trackers: An Indian Perspective

Discussions on concepts of Single Axis Tracker (SAT) are becoming more and more apt for developing countries like India not just as an advancement in racking technology but due to the utmost necessity of reaching at the lowest Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) targets. With this increasing competition and significant fall in feed-in tariffs of solar PV projects, developers are under constant pressure to secure investment for their projects and eventually earn profits from them. Moreover, being the second largest populated country, India suffers from scarcity of land because of higher average population density. So, to mitigate the risk of this dual edged sword with reducing trend of unit (kWh) cost at one side and utilization of land on the other, tracking evolved as the call of the hour. Therefore, the prime objectives of this paper are not only to showcase how STT proves to be an effective mechanism to get more gain in Global Incidence in collector plane (Ginc) with respect to traditional mounting systems but also to introduce Seasonally Tilted Tracker (STT) technology as a possible option for high latitude locations