Effectiveness of Tankana Bhasma Kavala in Tonsilitis

Tonsilitis refers to inflammation of the pharyngeal tonsils (glands at the back of the throat, visible through the mouth). The clinical features of Tundikeri can be compared with tonsillitis. In acute tonsilitis there will be throat pain, dysphagia, malaise, anorexia, fever and body ache. The tonsils appear to be swollen and congested. Chronic tonsilitis may be a complication of acute tonsilitis. Tankana Bhasma (Borax –Na2 B4 10H2O) a commonly available alkali appreciated as Kshara Raja or Kshara Shresta. It has got Katurasa, Ushna and Teekshna properties. It is Vrana Ropaka as well as Vatakapha Shamaka. So, Tankan Bhasma has been used as treatment of Tonsilitis in the form of Kavala. This is an experimental study of 40 patients with symptom of tonsilitis like redness, dysphagia, pain, swelling, and white pus in tonsil and were treated with Tankan Bhasma Kavala twice a day after food. Tankan Bhasma Kaval have resulted in clinically improvement in the symptom of Tonsilitis. There was a improvement in Redness by 76.47%, Dysphagia by 72.22%, Swelling by 50%, White pus by 50%, Pain by 75% in the duration of 15 days

Evaluation of Phytochemical, Antioxidant and Antibacterial Activities of Selected Medicinal Plants

Medicinal plants are important reservoirs of bioactive compounds that need to be explored systematically. Because of their chemical diversity, natural products provide limitless possibilities for new drug discovery. This study aimed to investigate the biochemical properties of crude extracts from fifteen Nepalese medicinal plants. The total phenolic contents (TPC), total flavonoid contents (TFC), and antioxidant activity were evaluated through a colorimetric approach while the antibacterial activities were studied through the measurement of the zone of inhibition (ZoI) by agar well diffusion method along with minimum inhibitory concentrations (MIC) by broth dilution method. The methanolic extracts of Acacia catechu and Eupoterium adenophorum showed the highest TPC (55.21 ± 11.09 mg GAE/gm) and TFC (10.23 ± 1.07 mg QE/gm) among the studied plant extracts. Acacia catechu showed effective antioxidant properties with an IC50 value of 1.3 μg/mL, followed by extracts of Myrica esculenta, Syzygium cumini, and Mangifera indica. Morus australis exhibited antibacterial activity against Klebsiella pneumoniae (ZoI: 25mm, MIC: 0.012 mg/mL), Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923 (ZoI: 22 mm, MIC: 0.012 mg/mL), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (ZoI; 20 mm, MIC: 0.05 mg/mL), and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) (ZoI: 19 mm, MIC: 0.19 mg/mL). Morus australis extract showed a broad-spectrum antibacterial activity, followed by Eclipta prostrata, and Hypericum cordifolium. Future study is recommended to explore secondary metabolites of those medicinal plants to uncover further clinical efficacy

A neighborhood statistics model for predicting stream pathogen indicator levels

Because elevated levels of water-borne Escherichia coli in streams are a leading cause of water quality impairments in the U.S., water-quality managers need tools for predicting aqueous E. coli levels. Presently, E. coli levels may be predicted using complex mechanistic models that have a high degree of unchecked uncertainty or simpler statistical models. To assess spatio-temporal patterns of instream E. coli levels, herein we measured E. coli, a pathogen indicator, at 16 sites (at four different times) within the Squaw Creek watershed, Iowa, and subsequently, the Markov Random Field model was exploited to develop a neighborhood statistics model for predicting instream E. coli levels. Two observed covariates, local water temperature (degrees Celsius) and mean cross-sectional depth (meters), were used as inputs to the model. Predictions of E. coli levels in the water column were compared with independent observational data collected from 16 in-stream locations. The results revealed that spatio-temporal averages of predicted and observed E. coli levels were extremely close. Approximately 66 % of individual predicted E. coli concentrations were within a factor of 2 of the observed values. In only one event, the difference between prediction and observation was beyond one order of magnitude. The mean of all predicted values at 16 locations was approximately 1 % higher than the mean of the observed values. The approach presented here will be useful while assessing instream contaminations such as pathogen/pathogen indicator levels at the watershed scale

Food, Farming, and Faith: A LAMP Symposium on Growing Community - Panel 2

The 2016 Leadership and Multifaith Program Symposium on Growing Community: Food, Farming, and Faith took place on March 1st, 2016 from 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. at the Historic Academy of Medicine at Georgia Tech.Sumayya Allen is a certified permaculture designer, an urban agriculturalist, and educator working to design, implement and support regenerative agro-ecosystems. Her commitment to growing healthy soil, food, and community has benefited the Atlanta community through her work with various organizations including Truly Living Well's Center for Natural Urban Agriculture, Global Growers Network, The Wylde Center, Gaia Gardens, and Emory University's Educational Garden Project. As a permaculture designer she has worked with Sustenance Design, applying ecological principles in the conscious design of diverse, resilient, productive and beautiful landscapes on various scales, from residential to city parks to educational facilities. She currently works as Community Agriculture Programming and Design Specialist with Farmer D Consulting on projects which span the U.S. Sumayya studied ecology at Emory University, where she earned her B.S. in Environmental Science and is currently working on her Master's degree in Agroecology at the University of Florida. Sumayya serves as a guide for permaculture, sustainable agriculture, and natural living with SacredService, an Islamic faith-based organization aiming to build and heal people and communities, where she leads a monthly Sacred Hike in and around Atlanta. She serves on the local advisory board for the Emory University Center for Ethics CREATE (Culture, Religion, Ethics and the Environment) Program. Since 2002, Sumayya has been a regular contributor to Azizah, a Muslim women's magazine, on topics of environmentalism, food and faith.Jennifer R. Ayres came to Candler in 2011. Her research interests include religious environmental education, social activism and religious identity, faith formation in the context of popular culture, and feminist practical theology. She is the author of two books: Waiting for a Glacier to Move: Practicing Social Witness (Wipf and Stock, 2011 ), and Good Food: Grounded Practical Theology (Baylor Univ. Press, 2013). Her current research, for which she received a grant from Emory's University Research Committee, investigates the educational task of cultivating Christian faith that is deeply rooted in our ecological context, with attention to the kinds of religious leaders needed for this work. A frequent speaker on topics of faith formation, religion and food, and Christian ecological theology and practice, Ayres also serves on the steering committee of the Green Seminaries Initiative and the Emory University Sustainable Food Committee. Over the years, her work has been supported by grants from the Association ofTheological Schools Lilly Research Grants, the Louisville Institute, and the American Academy of Religion. Ayres is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).Jonathan K. Crane holds a BA (sum ma cum laude) from Wheaton College in Massachusetts, an MA in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and an MPhil in Gandhian Thought from Gujarat Vidyapith in Ahmedabad, India. As a Wexner Graduate Fellow, he received both rabbinic ordination and a Master of Arts in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. He completed a PhD in Modern Jewish Thought at the University of Toronto. He currently serves as the Raymond F. Schinazi Scholar in Bioethics and Jewish Thought in the Center for Ethics at Emory University. The immediate past-president of the Society of Jewish Ethics, he has presented at conferences and taught around the world on such themes as Jewish ethics, bioethics, social and political ethics, warfare ethics, eating ethics, comparative religious ethics and interfaith relations, and Gandhian philosophy He is the author of Narratives and Jewish Bioethics (2013) and Ahimsa: The Way to Peace (2007, with Jordi Agusti-Panareda), co-editor with Elliot Dorff of The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Ethics and Morality (2012), and editor of Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (2015). Forthcoming books include Eating Ethically: Religious, Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Eating Well, and an edited volume tentatively entitled Race with Jewish Ethics. He founded and co-edits the journal of Jewish Ethics. He received a Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in 2014.Born and raised in the Nepalese Himalayan foothills, Professor Pramod Parajuli is an award-winning sustainability educator, visionary, and curricular and social innovator. Over the last 30 years, he has designed and developed various programs in critical literacy, sustainability studies, farm and garden-based ecological literacy, and "soil-to supper pedagogy" with schools in Portland, Oregon, Prescott, Arizona, Peruvian Amazon and Nepal. Dr. Parajuli currently serves as Associate Faculty for the PhD Program in Sustainability Education at Prescott College and is exploring the next phase of academic and community engagement, including founding of the Annapurna Pluriversity. For the last eight years, he served as a core faculty member and director of program development for Sustainability Studies/Education at Prescott College. A contributor to two volumes in the World Religions and Ecology series, he is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Religion and Sustainable Agriculture: World Spiritual Traditions and Food Ethic (University of Kentucky Press, 2016). One of the key elements of Dr. Parajuli's writings is the use of food, gardens, and agriculture as a platform for learning, cultivating leadership, and nurturing processes of social change that are not only "deep" but also "delicious."Jenny Leigh Smith is an assistant professor of history at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her work focuses on food, agriculture and the environmental impact of farming and food distribution. Her first book, Works in Progress: Plans and Realities on Soviet Farms, 1930- 7963 (Yale University Press, 2014), examined the environmental legacy of agricultural industrialization in the Soviet Union. Her new project is a global history of emergency famine relief over the course of the 20th century.Bill Winders is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech. He studies national policies, social movements, and the world economy, with a focus on food and agriculture. His book, The Politics of Food Supply: U.S. Agricultural Policy in the World Economy, won the 2011 Book Award from the Political Economy of the World-System section of the American Sociological Association. He also received the Bernstein & Byres Prize for his 2009 article in the journal of Agrarian Change comparing American and British food regimes. Winders is currently working on a few projects. The first project is a book titled Grains that will be published by Polity Press in late 2016. This book explores the geopolitics of grains, particularly corn, rice, and wheat. The second project examines food crises in the world economy, such as the 2007-2008 food crisis that saw food prices and world hunger rise dramatically. He has published articles on this topic in journals such as the Brown journal of World Affairs and Agriculture and Human Values. He is beginning a new project that examines the political economy of global meat.Jacob L. Wright serves as Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Candler School of Theology at Emory University, the Director of Graduate Studies in Emory's Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and an associate faculty member at Emory's Center for the Study of Law and Religion. He is the author of Rebuilding Identity: The Nehemiah Memoir and Its Earliest Readers (de Gruyter, 2004), which won a 2008 Templeton prize. Wright published his enhanced e-book, King David and His Reign Revisited (iTunes, 2013), billed as the first publication of its kind in the humanities. In 2015, his book, David, King of Israel, and Caleb in Biblical Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2014), won a Nancy Lapp Popular Book Award from the American Schools of Oriental Research and received an honorable mention in the theology and religious studies category at the 2015 PROSE Awards, administered by the Association of American Publishers. Wright delivered the prestigious 2010-11 lecture in Milieux biblique at the College de France in Paris, and was awarded a 2011- 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. In 2015, he received a $50,000 Templeton Foundation grant to underwrite a new research project with the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, which will examine the highly developed discourse regarding the knowledge of God in the Hebrew Bible, as well as comparative work with the New Testament.Runtime: 113:44 minutesSumayya Allen - TITLE: "Connecting Food and Stewardship in Islam". This presentation will focus on the Islamic concept of stewardship (khalifa) and how it pertains to caring for our environment and all of creation. Connecting to our place is where we begin to understand how this principle translates to our own lives. One way in which we can better connect to our place is by learning where our food comes from, how to grow our own, and the blessings that come from cultivating the land and feeding others. Community agriculture projects are perfect sites for not only bringing people together (of all faiths, cultures, and generations), but also serve to remind us of our human tie and dependency on the earth. Such projects can be catalysts for helping us to recognize and reestablish our roles as earth stewards.Jennifer R. Ayres - TITLE: "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Food and Farming". How might the eucharistic table, around which Christians regularly gather, serve as a paradigmatic embodiment of divine abundance, divine presence in the material gifts of the earth, and divine delight in the nourishment and enlivening of earthly bodies? And what does this table practice signify and demand in the midst of hunger, dramatic changes in agriculture, and environmental degradation? This presentation establishes a Christian theological framework for examining and responding to our food system, and examines the moral commitments undergirding this work.Pramod Parajuli - TITLE: "Earthbounding Faith? A Story of Soil to Supper/Sustenance Pedagogy". What is the use in thanking God for food that has come at an unbearable expense to the world and other people?” asks, Wendell Berry. “What use is it to save our soul, if we forfeit the earth?” asks Bruno Latour. Indeed, where is the faith in what I call the Soil to Supper/Sustenance Pedagogies? What about the existing faiths and even inter‐faith collaboratives? While sharing the stories around learning gardens, I will propose potential ideas such as pluri‐species earthbounding, or regenerative reciprocity. What if we imagine a food, farming and faith trio in which soils are rich and are dancing with more life while pollinators are pollinating and have enough to go around and multiply. What if a sacred thread binds, and nature and culture are coupled and co‐constitutive in this drama? With care and elegant design, could such a food and garden‐based learning system achieve abundance, beauty, as well as sacredness?Bill Winders - TITLE: "Feed Grains, Food Grains, and World Hunger". This presentation discusses how the market economy and political‐economic divisions between grains can, at times, contribute to world hunger and undermine food security. Two particular examples demonstrate this relationship: grain exports in South Asia, and expanding global meat consumption. First, in South Asia, several countries export grains even while having “alarming” levels of food insecurity. Why would this be the case? Second, the expansion of feed grains and meat production have the potential divert grain production or distribution away from food to more expensive livestock production, but increased meat production also has the potential to use important resources (e.g., water and land).Jacob l. Wright - TITLE: "Food in Judaism". This response will examine some of the leading attitudes toward food production and consumption in the Hebrew Bible and early Jewish rabbinic sources. It will show that both topics are central features in biblical and early Jewish writings, and that these writings reflect ways of thinking about food that both resonate with and challenge our contemporary practices.H. Bruce McEverThe Foundation for Religious LiteracyThe Arthur Vining Davis Foundation

In Silico Elucidation of Potent Inhibitors from Natural Products for Nonstructural Proteins of Dengue Virus

Medicinal plants have been used from the beginning of human civilization against various health complications. Dengue virus (DENV) has emerged as one of the most widespread viruses in tropical and subtropical countries. Yet no clinically approved antiviral drug is available to combat DENV infection. Consequently, the search for novel antidengue agents from medicinal plants has assumed more insistence than in previous days. This study has focused on 31 potential antidengue molecules from secondary metabolites to examine their inhibitory activity against DENV nonstructural proteins through molecular docking and pharmacokinetics studies. In this research, the wet lab experiments were tested on a computational platform. Agathisflavone and pectolinarin are the top-scored inhibitors of DENV NS2B/NS3 protease and NS5 polymerase, respectively. Epigallocatechin gallate, Pinostrobin, Panduratin A, and Pectolinarin could be potential lead compounds against NS2B/NS3 protease, while acacetin-7-O-rutinoside against NS5 polymerase. Moreover, agathisflavone (LD50= 1430 mg/kg) and pectolinarin (LD50= 5000 mg/kg) exhibited less toxicity than nelfinavir (LD50= 600 mg/kg) and balapiravir (LD50 = 824 mg/kg), and the reference drugs. Further research on clinical trials is required to analyze the therapeutic efficacy of these metabolites to develop new potential drug candidates against different serotypes of DENV

Pharmacotherapies in Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.

BACKGROUND: Heart failure (HF) with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) causes significant cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. It is a growing problem in the developed world, especially, in the aging population. There is a paucity of data on the treatment of patients with HFpEF. We aimed to identify pharmacotherapies that improve peak oxygen consumption (peak VO METHODS: We conducted a systematic literature search for English studies in PubMed, EMBASE, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google scholar. We searched databases using terms relating to or describing HFpEF, stage C HFpEF, and diastolic HF and included only randomized controlled trials (RCTs). RevMan 5.4 (The Cochrane Collaboration, 2020, London, UK) was used for data analysis, and two independent investigators performed literature retrieval and data-extraction. We used PRISMA guidelines to report the outcomes. We included 14 articles in our systematic review and six studies in meta-analysis. RESULTS: We calculated the pooled mean difference (MD) of peak VO CONCLUSION: Compared to placebo, none of the pharmacotherapies significantly improved peak VO2 in HFpEF except ivabradine. In our meta-analysis, the pooled improvement in peak V