Bacterial profiles and risk factors for neonatal sepsis in a rural tertiary care hospital in north India

Objectives: To study, the bacterial profile in cases of neonatal sepsis admitted to the neonatal nursery or neonatal intensive care unit(NICU) and to identify the risk factors for early-onset neonatal sepsis. Design: Retrospective survey of hospital records from January2012 to December 2012. Setting: A neonatal unit of a rural medical college hospital. Subjects: All inborn and outborn neonates whoeither had clinical signs of sepsis or were born to mothers with risk factors for sepsis and underwent a sepsis screen. Neonatal sepsiswas defined as positive blood culture in babies younger than 1 month of age who had clinical signs of sepsis or had maternal risk factorsfor sepsis. Results: 396 neonates were screened for sepsis during the study period, of which 64 (16%) were culture positive. Of these,42 (65.6%) had early-onset sepsis while 22 (34.3%) had late-onset sepsis (LOS). There were 6 deaths among those who had sepsis(9.3%). The predominant organisms in both early and LOS were Klebsiella and Staphylococcus aureus followed by Escherichia coli.Conclusion: The pattern of isolates is more or less similar to that seen in other NICU across the country. Klebsiella and S. aureus weretwo of the commonest organisms isolated in our study

Upcycling of surgical facemasks into carbon based thin film electrode for supercapacitor technology

Abstract Polypropylene (PP), a commonly used plastic, is used for making the outer layers of a surgical face mask. In 2020, around 3 billion surgical face masks were disposed into the environment, causing a huge threat to wildlife, aquatic life, and ecosystems. In this work, we have reported the sulfonation technique for stabilizing the surgical face masks and their conversion into carbon nanoparticles for application as a supercapacitor electrode. The electrode is fabricated by preparing a slurry paste of carbon nanoparticles and pasting it on a conductive wearable fabric. To investigate the performance of the carbon thin film electrode, electrochemical techniques are employed. The Cyclic Voltammetry (CV) analysis performed at different scan rates in a 6 molar KOH electrolyte reveals that the carbon thin film acts as a positive electrode. At 4 A g−1, the electrode shows a specific capacitance of 366.22 F g−1 and 100% retention of specific capacitance for 8000 cycles. A two-electrode asymmetric device is fabricated using carbon thin film as the positive electrode, NiO thin film as the negative electrode, and a KOH separator between two electrodes. The device shows a specific capacitance of 113.73 F g−1 at 1.3 A g−1 and glows a red LED for 6 min. This work is a step towards upcycling the waste produced from surgical face masks used during the COVID-19 pandemic and its application for energy storage

Polyglobulia Masquerading as Polycythaemia Vera Presenting as Superior Mesenteric Vein Thrombosis: A Case Report

Polyglobulia is secondary polycythaemia commonly due to underlying non haematological diseases like Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), obstructive sleep apnoea and also sometimes in people living in hilly or forest areas. It can occur in any venous or atrial thrombosis of the vessels, but cardiac, cerebral, and mesenteric vessels are usually involved. One of the rare causes of abrupt severe abdominal discomfort is portal vein thrombosis, usually associated with liver cirrhosis and thrombophilia. In this case report, the authors have highlighted a case of a 36-year-old male residing in the hilly area of Maharashtra, India, who reported to hospital with severe abdominal pain due to superior mesenteric vein thrombosis. On investigation, he had increased haemoglobin with raised haematocrit diagnosed as polyglobulia and became part of polycythaemia with positive JAK2 V617F mutation

A comprehensive review on synthesis and applications of single crystal perovskite halides

Halide based perovskite materials have fascinated strong attention for being a hopeful candidate for optoelectronic device applications. Single-crystalline halide perovskites exhibit no grain boundaries and possess low trap densities; and are therefore likely to show superior optoelectronic performances in comparison to their polycrystalline film counterparts. In spite of this, their basic perceptive of physico-chemical properties are however controversial to the scientific society. In this review article, we present the deep insight into all the reported protocols available for the synthesis of purely inorganic as well as hybrid halide perovskites (incorporating organic as well as inorganic cation) to achieve high-quality single crystals. On account of advanced characteristics like long carrier recombination lifetime and exciton diffusion length, wide-ranging visible to NIR absorption, high charge mobility, controllable optoelectronic properties etc., hybrid halide perovskites have emerged to be a tough challenger in the optoelectronic research area in comparison to the purely inorganic halide perovskites and have consequently been paid much attention. Therefore, the optoelectronic properties and convenient applications of particularly hybrid halide single-crystal perovskites in various optoelectronic devices like solar cell, laser, high energy ray detector, photodetector, light-emitting diode, etc are highlighted