Removal of copper(II) from aqueous solution using spent tea leaves (STL) as a potential sorbent

In this work spent tea leaves were used as a non-conventional, cost-effective sorbent for removal of Cu(II) from aqueous solutions in batch systems. The sorbent was characterised with respect to surface area, pore volume, density, etc. The equilibrium sorption data were applied to various sorption isotherm models, and the order of fitness was: Langmuir > Temkin > Freundlich. The maximum sorption capacity Qo was found to be almost 90.9 and 68.4, as evaluated using Langmuir isotherms at 27ºC and 37ºC respectively. The observed decrease in sorption capacity with temperature indicated the exothermic nature of the uptake process. The kinetic uptake data were best interpreted by a pseudo second-order kinetic model with values of rate constants of adsorption of 1.47 x 10-2 and 3.01 x 10-2 g/mg∙min, respectively, for the initial sorbate concentrations of 10 and 20 mg∙ℓ-1 at 27ºC. The sorption mean free energy was determined from the Dubinin Radushkevich (DR) isotherm model and was found to be 9.91 kJ∙mol-1, indicating ion exchange/chemisorption nature of uptake process. The Cu(II) uptake was found to increase with the pH of the sorbate solution and maximum sorption was observed in the pH range of 1.0 to 4.8. Finally, thermodynamic parameters like ΔGo, ΔHo, ΔSo were also evaluated. Keywords: Spent tea leaves, copper(II), adsorption, Langmuir mode

IN VITRO ANTIBACTERIAL ACTIVITY OF GREEN TEA EXTRACT AGAINST MULTIDRUG-RESISTANT BACTERIA

Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the antimicrobial activity of ethanolic extract of green tea (Camellia sinensis) against multidrug-resistant strains of the pathogenic bacteria: Extended-spectrum-β-lactamase (ESBL) producing Enterobacteriaceae, Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), and Metallo-β-lactamase (MBL) producing Pseudomonas aeruginosa strains. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the antibacterial activity of ethanolic extract of commercial green tea against the 23 multidrug-resistant test strains was evaluated by the Agar well diffusion method, and the minimum inhibitory concentration of the extract for the test strains was determined by Agar plate dilution method. Results: Ethanolic extract of green tea was found to exhibit a remarkably significant antimicrobial activity against the ATCC (American type culture collection) control strains: E. coli ATCC 25922 and P. aeruginosa ATCC 27853 with slightly higher activity against later as compared to the former. The extract exhibited a significant antibacterial activity against multidrug-resistant bacterial strains. The highest activity was shown against ESBL producing strains, followed by CRE strains and the least activity against MBL producers. Conclusion: This study strongly depicts that the ethanolic extract of green tea exhibits significant antibacterial activity even against multidrug-resistant strains. Hence, such plant extracts could be a potential source of bioactive lead compounds that could be utilized in developing herbal antimicrobials as an alternative strategy for tackling the problem of antimicrobial resistance

Cancer incidence in the south Asian population of California, 1988–2000

BACKGROUND: Although South Asians (SA) form a large majority of the Asian population of U.S., very little is known about cancer in this immigrant population. SAs comprise people having origins mainly in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. We calculated age-adjusted incidence and time trends of cancer in the SA population of California (state with the largest concentration of SAs) between 1988–2000 and compared these rates to rates in native Asian Indians as well as to those experienced by the Asian/Pacific Islander (API) and White, non-Hispanic population (NHW) population of California. METHODS: Age adjusted incidence rates observed among the SA population of California during the time period 1988–2000 were calculated. To correctly identify the ethnicity of cancer cases, 'Nam Pehchan' (British developed software) was used to identify numerator cases of SA origin from the population-based cancer registry in California (CCR). Denominators were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau. Incidence rates in SAs were calculated and a time trend analysis was also performed. Comparison data on the API and the NHW population of California were also obtained from CCR and rates from Globocan 2002 were used to determine rates in India. RESULTS: Between 1988–2000, 5192 cancers were diagnosed in SAs of California. Compared to rates in native Asian Indians, rates of cancer in SAs in California were higher for all sites except oropharyngeal, oesophageal and cervical cancers. Compared to APIs of California, SA population experienced more cancers of oesophagus, gall bladder, prostate, breast, ovary and uterus, as well as lymphomas, leukemias and multiple myelomas. Compared to NHW population of California, SAs experienced more cancers of the stomach, liver and bile duct, gall bladder, cervix and multiple myelomas. Significantly increasing time trends were observed in colon and breast cancer incidence. CONCLUSION: SA population of California experiences unique patterns of cancer incidence most likely associated with acculturation, screening and tobacco habits. There is need for early diagnosis of leading cancers in SA. If necessary steps are not taken to curb the growth of breast, colon and lung cancer, rates in SA will soon approximate those of the NHW population of California

Intraoral Foregut Cystic Developmental Malformations: Three cases with a brief review of literature

Foregut cystic developmental malformations (FCDM) are a type of rare cystic lesion. The occurrence of FCDM is exceedingly uncommon in the intraoral location. We report three cases of FCDM with intraoral location who presented at Chacha Nehru Bal Chikitsalaya, New Delhi, India, in 2016, 2017 and 2018 with symptoms of respiratory distress and feeding difficulties. Two patients were male and one was female with an age range of 29 days to eight years. The clinical differential diagnosis included mucocele, ranula, dermoid, lymphangioma, teratoma, thyroglossal duct cyst, etc. All patients were treated with simple surgical excision and diagnosed, based on histopathology, with FCDM. These should be considered as differential diagnosis of head and neck midline cystic mass lesions. This case report aimed to discuss differential diagnosis and appropriate terminology for these cystic masses as there is varied and ambiguous nomenclature.Keywords: Bronchogenic Cyst; Cyst; Congenital Abnormalities; Oral Cavity; Case Report; India

Formulation, Development and Evaluation of Fast Dissolving Oral Film of Antipsychotic Drug

In case of psychiatric treatment immediate release of drug from the dosage form is required. Fast dissolving dosage forms are gaining popularity in recent time, as this dosage forms requires no water for administration. Oral films dissolve rapidly along with drug in mouth and majority of the drug is absorbed through buccal/oral mucosa in to systemic circulation avoiding first pass metabolism. Olanzapine is a thienobenzodiazepine class of drugs, which has been approved by the FDA, for the treatment of schizophrenia, depressive episodes associated with bipolar disorder, acute manic episodes and maintenance treatment in bipolar disorder. The absolute bioavailability is only approximately 31.5% due to extensive hepatic metabolism. Thus the objective of the present study was to formulate and evaluate fast dissolving oral films of Olanzapine to improve water solubility, dissolution rate, oral bioavailability and reduction of first pass metabolism and increase patient’s compliance. Oral fast dissolving films prepared by solvent casting method using water and 95% ethanol as solvents and HPMC as film forming polymer. PEG 400 was the selected plasticizers, Superdisintegrants such as croscarmellose sodium (CCS) and sodium starch glycolate (SSG) alone and also in combinations was incorporated to achieve the aim. The prepared films were evaluated for the drug content, weight variation, film thickness, disintegration time, folding endurance, percentage of moisture content and in vitro dissolution studies. Among all, the formulation F4 was found to be best formulation which releases 98.78 % of the drug within 15 min and disintegration time is 42 sec. which was significantly high when compared to other formulation. The data obtained from In-vitro release were fitted into the various kinetic models such as Zero Order, Higuchi, First Order and Korsmeyer–Peppas Model in order to determine the mechanism of drug release. When the regression coefficient values compared, it was observed that ‘r’ values of formulation F4 was maximum i.e 0.974 hence indicating drug release from formulations was found to follow first order drug release kinetics. &nbsp

A study to assess knowledge and attitude of antenatal women about maternal nutrition attending a tertiary care centre

Background: Nutrition is the fundamental pillar of human life. All human beings need a balanced amount of nutrients for proper functioning of body system. Inadequate nutrition during pregnancy has a negative impact on the pregnant mother as well as short and long term consequences on the newborn. This study aims to assess knowledge and attitude of antenatal women about maternal nutrition in pregnancy and highlights the need of interventions aimed at promoting awareness about healthy diet during pregnancy in association with various socio demographic factors.Methods: This study was conducted on 850 antenatal women attending the antenatal clinic of UISEMH, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India from August 2015 to February 2016. A 25 point- 10 minute questionnaire was designed to collect information about awareness and myths associated with nutrition in pregnancy from antenatal women.Results: Only 22 % of the women had good knowledge about nutrition during pregnancy and 82% showed willingness to acquire more information about maternal nutrition. Source of information for most pregnant women were immediate family members (41%). Most women were lacking in their knowledge about common local sources of nutrition, adequate weight gain during pregnancy and effects of over and under nutrition.Conclusions: There is need to impart more knowledge to pregnant women about nutrition in pregnancy. More attention should be paid on nutritional guidance among pregnant women especially in young and less well educated women for healthy outcome of mother and babies. This study emphasizes the importance of dietary counselling by attending doctors as an integral part of antenatal care

Text Summarization Technique for Punjabi Language Using Neural Networks

In the contemporary world, utilization of digital content has risen exponentially. For example, newspaper and web articles, status updates, advertisements etc. have become an integral part of our daily routine. Thus, there is a need to build an automated system to summarize such large documents of text in order to save time and effort. Although, there are summarizers for languages such as English since the work has started in the 1950s and at present has led it up to a matured stage but there are several languages that still need special attention such as Punjabi language. The Punjabi language is highly rich in morphological structure as compared to English and other foreign languages. In this work, we provide three phase extractive summarization methodology using neural networks. It induces compendious summary of Punjabi single text document. The methodology incorporates pre-processing phase that cleans the text; processing phase that extracts statistical and linguistic features; and classification phase. The classification based neural network applies an activation function- sigmoid and weighted error reduction-gradient descent optimization to generate the resultant output summary. The proposed summarization system is applied over monolingual Punjabi text corpus from Indian languages corpora initiative phase-II. The precision, recall and F-measure are achieved as 90.0%, 89.28% an 89.65% respectively which is reasonably good in comparison to the performance of other existing Indian languages" summarizers.This research is partially funded by the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, Spain (CSO2017-86747-R)

Automatic Text Summarization for Hindi Using Real Coded Genetic Algorithm

In the present scenario, Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) is in great demand to address the ever-growing volume of text data available online to discover relevant information faster. In this research, the ATS methodology is proposed for the Hindi language using Real Coded Genetic Algorithm (RCGA) over the health corpus, available in the Kaggle dataset. The methodology comprises five phases: preprocessing, feature extraction, processing, sentence ranking, and summary generation. Rigorous experimentation on varied feature sets is performed where distinguishing features, namely- sentence similarity and named entity features are combined with others for computing the evaluation metrics. The top 14 feature combinations are evaluated through Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) measure. RCGA computes appropriate feature weights through strings of features, chromosomes selection, and reproduction operators: Simulating Binary Crossover and Polynomial Mutation. To extract the highest scored sentences as the corpus summary, different compression rates are tested. In comparison with existing summarization tools, the ATS extractive method gives a summary reduction of 65%

Assessment of prescription completeness and antibiotic consumption at a rural health and training centre, Delhi

Background: The prescription audit is a useful method to assess the doctors’ contribution to the rational use of drugs in a country. A prescription is considered complete when it covers all the parts of the prescription. The polypharmacy increased the risk of drug interaction, dispensing errors and confused the patients for dosage schedules. A prescription with the minimum number of drugs per prescription helps in rational pharmacotherapeutics. The objectives of this study were to describe the pattern and completeness of prescription at rural health and training center and to estimate antibiotic consumption at rural health and training center.Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted to determine the current prescribing practice at RHTC. Data were collected in the two pharmacies of the rural hospital. A total of 612 prescriptions with the last refill were considered for the assessment.Results: The average number of drugs prescribed per prescription 3.53. The percentage of prescriptions in which an antibiotic was prescribed was 20%. The percentage of drugs prescribed by generic name and from an essential drug list was 71.5% and 98.7% respectively. The most commonly prescribed form of antibiotics was extended-spectrum penicillin.Conclusions: All the prescriptions were complete covered parts of prescriptions. The dosing errors were present in maximum prescriptions. The WHO prescribing indicators were within the limits, an average number of drugs per prescription suggests a practice of polypharmacy. The peak of the use of antibiotics was observed in September followed by January and November. The least use of antibiotics was in December followed by June.

The impact of different fertiliser management options and cultivars on nitrogen use efficiency and yield for rice cropping in the Indo-Gangetic Plain: two seasons of methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia emissions

This study presents detailed crop and gas flux data from two years of rice production at the experimental farm of the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India. In comparing 4 nitrogen (N) fertiliser regimes across 4 rice cultivars (CRD 310, IR-64, MTU 1010, P-44), we have added to growing evidence of the environmental costs of rice production in the region. The study shows that rice cultivar can impact yields of both grain, and total biomass produced in given circumstances, with the CRD 310 cultivar showing consistently high nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) for total biomass compared with other tested varieties, but not necessarily with the highest grain yield, which was P-44 in this experiment. While NUE of the rice did vary depending on experimental treatments (ranging from 41% to 73%), 73%), this did not translate directly into the reduction of emissions of ammonia (NH3) and nitrous oxide (N2O). Emissions were relatively similar across the different rice cultivars regardless of NUE. Conversely, agronomic practices that reduced total N losses were associated with higher yield. In terms of fertiliser application, the outstanding impact was of the very high methane (CH4) emissions as a result of incorporating farmyard manure (FYM) into rice paddies, which dominated the overall effect on global warming potential. While the use of nitrification and urease inhibiting substances decreased N2O emissions overall, NH3 emissions were relatively unaffected (or slightly higher). Overall, the greatest reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions came from reducing irrigation water added to the fields, resulting in higher N2O, but significantly less CH4 emissions, reducing net GHG emission compared with continuous flooding. Overall, genetic differences generated more variation in yield and NUE than agronomic management (excluding controls), whereas agronomy generated larger differences than genetics concerning gaseous losses. This study suggests that a mixed approach needs to be applied when attempting to reduce pollution and global warming potential from rice production and potential pollution swapping and synergies need to be considered. Finding the right balance of rice cultivar, irrigation technique and fertiliser type could significantly reduce emissions, while getting it wrong can result in considerably poorer yields and higher pollution