Distorted and Victimized Lives of Women in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale

This study intends to evaluate Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale from the viewpoint of feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which offers a more nuanced perspective on sexuality and gender. Beauvoir's philosophy centres on the societal systems of oppression that designate women as ‘Other’ to a male reputation. According to her, femininity is something that society imposes on women, and feminism cannot be reduced to a basic biological statement. According to her, ‘Other’ best reflects the primary social function of a woman. She disputes the vocabulary that defines women based on their biology and asserts that biology is the primary cause of women's subjugation in patriarchal societies. She believes that sexuality contributes to the subjugation and exploitation of women. According to Beauvoir, the prostitution business and the heterosexual lifestyle are the two most visible instances of women's exploitation. Clearly, she rejects the notion that heterosexuality is the norm in sexual encounters. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how Atwood employs conjecture to examine feminist issues in The Handmaid's Tale, such as women's identity loss, subordination in a patriarchal society, and exploitation in a consumer culture where the female body is considered an object. In her novel, Atwood examines issues pertaining to the subjugation of women, such as gender inequality and the flaws of the patriarchal system

Prevalence of microorganisms causing catheter associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) among catheterised patients admitted in a tertiary care hospital

Background: Catheter-associated urinary tract infection (CAUTI) is an important cause of morbidity and mortality in Indian subjects, affecting all age groups. Bacteriuria orcandiduria is almost inevitable in nearly half of the patients who require an indwelling urinary catheter for more than 5 days. The objective of this study was to find the prevalence of CAUTI infection and to determine their antibiotic profileMethods: The present cross-sectional study included 50 patients admitted to medicine and surgery wards in our hospital. The urine from catheter is collected from each patient and subjected to culture and antibiotic susceptibility testing.Results: The prevalence of catheter associated urinary tract infection in our hospital is about 20% and asymptomatic bacterial colonization is 50% which is nearequal to Danchaivijitr S et al study. The common pathogens found in this study are Escherichia coli (22%), Klebsiella (18%), Enterobacter (8%), Staph. aureus (6%) which include MRSA (4%), Pseudomonas (6%), Enterococcus (4%), Candida sps. (4%) Andproteus (2%).Conclusions: CAUTI has low prevalence 20% and asymptomatic colonisation 50% in our hospital with common pathogen being Escherichia coli. It is one of the important notable pathogen causing nosocomial infection among admitted patients. The patients present mainly as asymptomatic bacterial colonisation and risk of CAUTI increases with longer duration of catheterisation. All patients those who had catheter for more than 6 days, aged 60 and above, should be checked for UTI symptoms. And their urine should be cultured regularly in order to diagnose and prevent CAUTI and its complications which are very dangerous and difficult to treat

Adverse drug effects monitoring of amlodipine in a tertiary care hospital

Background: Amlodipine have been widely used drug for the treatment of Hypertension. It has many beneficial effects and less side effects. But, only very few adverse effects of Amlodipine have been documented and many were not reported. So, this study will bring out the possible adverse effect of Amlodipine.Methods: This study included 100 patients with hypertension who are taking amlodipine only. Patients who were willing to participate in the study were given a questionnaire containing demographic data and adverse drug profile of amlodipine. The symptoms of adverse drug reaction were documented. They were also asked about the other symptoms they are having, other than the questionnaire. The causality assessment was done by WHO assessment scale and severity by using modified Hartwig seigel severity assessment scale.Results: This study showed that most of the patients belong to 51-60 years age group. Mostly they were females, and many were having disease for less than a year. Most of the patients developed adverse drug reaction. Many patients had more than one adverse drug reaction. The commonest adverse effect were fatigue, palpitation, dizziness, insomnia, headache, joint pain, light-headedness, somnolence, nausea, flushing abdominal pain, tremor, leg pain, neck pain, back pain and edema. The adverse drug reaction(ADRs) mostly belongs to possible category and were mild.Conclusions: Most of the patients who were taking amlodipine had atleast one adverse drug reaction during their treatment period. It is mild, needs dose adjustment and healthy life style modification

Non-Preservative Combination in Wireless Frame Capacity System

Remote Body Area Networks (WBAN), as a promising health­care framework, can give colossal advantages to opportune and constant patient consideration and remote wellbeing checking. Attributable to the limitation of correspondence, calculation and power in WBAN s, cloud helped WBAN s, which offer progressively solid, keen, and opportune health­care administrations for versatile clients and patients, are getting expanding consideration. Boycott gadgets might be inserted inside the body, inserts, might be surface mounted on the body in a settled position, Wearable innovation might be went with gadgets which people can convey in various positions, in garments pockets, by hand or in different sacks .The improvement of boycott innovation was begun around 1995 by thought of utilizing remote individual territory arrange (WPAN).Some of the utilizations of WBAN will be it will be useful for heart patients to follow their wellbeing status and illuminate it to the specialist.However, how to aggregate the health data multi functionality and efficiently is still an open issue to the cloud server (CS).The CS can compute multiple statistical functions of user’s health data and aggregating to offer various services. Specifically, we first propose non additive aggregation of various data sets to find out the minimum and maximum value of the dataset are found and by finding this min and max value for a data set (data of patients), this data helps the doctor to medicate according to their health position known from the data. This data also helps in grouping them. Hence this will be an efficient and easy way to workout

AUTOMATED HUMIDITY SYSTEM FOR PROFICIENT WATER AND ENERGY CONSUMPTION

The paper proposes an intelligent irrigation system with water and energy monitoring with the aim of reducing water and energy consumption in long term. It also eliminates the continuous human intervention in the field. Agriculture plays an important role for the economic development of a country. Utilising the water resources effectively and efficiently for agriculture will in long term preserve the ground water resources. And energy management also is an important feature that is taken into consideration while designing this system.  In the conventional irrigation system, the farmer has to continuously monitor the soil and weather conditions for growth of crops. The proposed system measures the various parameters such as soil-moisture, soil temperature, Ph value, rainfall, humidity, etc, and the decision is made on the collective values of the parameters. Sensors for each of the above parameters produce the continuous inputs for the system which are compared with the reference values to provide the control outputs of the system. The water quantity and the power consumption are continuously measured for determining the total consumption per month and alerting the user.  The field and weather conditions are continuously recorded for the future use of the farmer

Study to evaluate post operative drop in serum albumin as a marker for surgical stress and predictor for clinical outcome in laparatomy patients

Surgical interventions trigger a metabolic stress response of varying magnitude which contributes to complications, delayed recovery and prolonged hospital stay. A number of preoperative interventions allow modulating an excessive stress response, some of them having an important positive impact on clinical outcome. Therefore, a trustworthy forecast of the surgical stress response is of high interest. The ideal marker has to be easy to measure, available early in the preoperative course, and economical. It should be robustly correlated with the extent of surgical trauma and be a reliable predictor of complications and prolonged hospital stay. So far, no such parameter is available. Albumin, the most abundant protein in humans, is widely used as a nutritional marker and an outcome predictor. Albumin also shows an instantaneous response to surgical tension and could, therefore, meet the criteria to determine surgical stress and to predict a complicated postoperative course. The present study aims to assess serum albumin levels as response marker for surgical stress and as a predictor of adverse outcomes. A prospective study was done for nine months of cases undergoing laparotomy both electively and in an emergency between the age group of 16 to 70 years. Serum albumin (g/L) levels were measured in preoperative period in a homogeneous manner as per the hospital technical guidelines. Blood samples on Post Operative Day were taken 4–6 hours postoperatively. Subsequently, daily albumin level was monitored up to POD – 5. Complications after surgery were graded by use of validated Dindo-Clavien system; grades I-II were measured as minor and III-IV were measured as major complications, respectively. Mortality was documented as grade V. Hospital stay was counted from the day of surgery. Preoperative and postoperative albumin levels were measured for the patients and correlation between the post-op fall in albumin level was compared with the incidence of post-op complications as determined by Dindo-Clavien scoring. Following results were obtained. The age distribution of the participants was with a mean age of 45 (S.D=15.905). Majority of them were males (60%, n=30). The Dindo-Clavien Scoring of the patients showed that 19 of them were in grade I. The duration of the stay was a mean of 8.32 days (S.D=4.468) for 47 patients while two of them died on 10thpost-operative day and one of them on 12thpost-operative day. A repetitive measures ANOVA with a Greenhouse-Geisser correction determined that mean serum albumin differed statistically significantly between time points (F (2.321, 113.750) = 69.895, P < 0.0005). In this study, the fall in serum albumin levels was related to the magnitude of surgery and the surgical stress associated with it. Clinical outcomes were also related to the postoperative albumin levels. Future studies should be focussed on correlating the results from multi-site, multi-city studies to prove albumin as a reliable indicator of post operative surgical stress. Translating these findings into decision making protocols for therapeutic procedures is important

ANALYSIS OF MOLECULAR DOCKING EFFICIENCY OF CLEISTANTHIN-A, AS AN ALTERNATIVE FOR NICOTINE ADDICTION

Objective: The present research was aimed to understand the molecular docking efficiency of a plant-derived compound cleistanthin-A and a common ingredient in tobacco consumption nicotine with nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR).Methods: The 3-D structure of nAChR was retrieved from the protein data bank (ID 5AFH). Ligand was obtained from the PUBCHEM. The in silico protocol comprised of three steps: high-throughput virtual screening (HTVS), standard preci­sion (SP) and extra precision (XP). The screened molecules were ranked accordingly using glide score. Schrödinger tool was used to perform the docking analysis.Results: The binding efficiency of the nicotine and cleistanthin-A was found to be docked at the cys-cys loop of the receptor. Based upon the glide score and glide energy it can be reported that, nicotine binding can be inhibited by the binding of cleistanthin-A to the nAChR.Conclusion: The docking efficiency of cleistanthin-A was good compared to nicotine towards nAChR. Hence, cleistanthin–A was derived as a better choice as an alternative for nicotine in smoke therapy

Atomic Force microscopy reveals a role for endothelial cell ICAM-1 expression in bladder cancer cell adherence

International audienceCancer metastasis is a complex process involving cell-cell interactions mediated by cell adhesive molecules. In this study we determine the adhesion strength between an endothelial cell monolayer and tumor cells of different metastatic potentials using Atomic Force Microscopy. We show that the rupture forces of receptor-ligand bonds increase with retraction speed and range between 20 and 70 pN. It is shown that the most invasive cell lines (T24, J82) form the strongest bonds with endothelial cells. Using ICAM-1 coated substrates and a monoclonal antibody specific for ICAM-1, we demonstrate that ICAM-1 serves as a key receptor on endothelial cells and that its interactions with ligands expressed by tumor cells are correlated with the rupture forces obtained with the most invasive cancer cells (T24, J82). For the less invasive cancer cells (RT112), endothelial ICAM-1 does not seem to play any role in the adhesion process. Moreover, a detailed analysis of the distribution of rupture forces suggests that ICAM-1 interacts preferentially with one ligand on T24 cancer cells and with two ligands on J82 cancer cells. Possible counter receptors for these interactions are CD43 and MUC1, two known ligands for ICAM-1 which are expressed by these cancer cells