KAP Study on Immunization of Children in a City of North India – A 30 Cluster Survey

Background: To determine the knowledge, attitude and practices about immunization among respondents of children aged 12-23 months.\ud Methods: A total of 510 respondents were interviewed in the urban slums of Lucknow district of India, using 30 cluster sampling technique from January 2005 to April 2005. A pre-tested structured questionnaire was used to elicit the information about the knowledge, attitude and practices of the respondents regarding immunization. \ud Results: Knowledge regarding the disease prevented, number of doses and correct age of administration of BCG was highest among all the categories of respondents. The paramedical worker was the main source of information to the respondents of completely (52.0%) and partially immunized (48.5%) children while community leaders for unimmunized children. Those availing private facilities were more completely immunized, as compared to the government facilities. 55.8% of those who took 20 minutes to reach the immunization site were completely immunized as compared to 64.1% of those who took more than 20 minutes.\ud Conclusion: Considering the incomplete knowledge, and inappropriate practices of the people, the policy makers and medical professionals require Herculean efforts to raise the knowledge and to break the old beliefs of the peopl

Engineering Properties of Bentonite-Lime-Phosphogypsum Composite Reinforced with Treated Sisal Fibers

The present work primarily investigates the unconfined compressive strength, the tensile load-diametral strain, the toughness characteristics and the shear strengths of bentonite-lime-phosphogypsum-treated sisal fibre composite. The unconfined compressive strengths and tensile strengths were obtained using the unconfined compressive test and indirect tensile test respectively. The results revealed that the unconfined compressive stress, the deviator stress and the tensile load at failure of bentonite-lime-phosphogypsum composite with untreated sisal fibres could be improved by the successive chemical treatment with sodium periodate, p-aminophenol and sodium hydroxide. The brittleness index and deformability index indicated a change from the brittle to ductile behavior of the bentonite-lime-phosphogypsum-untreated sisal fiber composite, with the chemical treatment

Marketing System and Efficiency of Indian Major Carps in India

The Kolleru Lake area (KLA) in Andhra Pradesh being a predominant centre for carp culture is known as the ‘Carp Pocket of India’. This paper has described the highly efficient fish marketing system prevalent in the KLA and has compared it with the marketing of Indian Major Carps (IMC) in other major aquaculture states like West Bengal and Orissa and marine states like Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The marketing channels, market intermediaries, price spread and marketing efficiency have been presented. A comparison of the marketing channels at several fish markets has revealed that the price spread for IMC from Kolleru is highest at the Mumbai market and lowest at the Coimbatore market. Consequently, fishermen’s share in consumer price has been found highest for Coimbatore at 61.54 per cent and lowest for Mumbai at 47.06 per cent. Similarly, the marketing efficiency was the highest for Coimbatore at 2.60 and lowest for Mumbai at 1.89. Retail price for KLA carps has been found lower than locally cultured carps at various areas, reflecting the efficiency of the marketing channel in providing cheap fish transported over large distances and through a large number of intermediaries. The reasons for the efficient IMC marketing system at KLA have been discussed and the study has recommended the development of efficient fish marketing system in other parts of the country.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Towards Last-layer Retraining for Group Robustness with Fewer Annotations

Empirical risk minimization (ERM) of neural networks is prone to over-reliance on spurious correlations and poor generalization on minority groups. The recent deep feature reweighting (DFR) technique achieves state-of-the-art group robustness via simple last-layer retraining, but it requires held-out group and class annotations to construct a group-balanced reweighting dataset. In this work, we examine this impractical requirement and find that last-layer retraining can be surprisingly effective with no group annotations (other than for model selection) and only a handful of class annotations. We first show that last-layer retraining can greatly improve worst-group accuracy even when the reweighting dataset has only a small proportion of worst-group data. This implies a "free lunch" where holding out a subset of training data to retrain the last layer can substantially outperform ERM on the entire dataset with no additional data or annotations. To further improve group robustness, we introduce a lightweight method called selective last-layer finetuning (SELF), which constructs the reweighting dataset using misclassifications or disagreements. Our empirical and theoretical results present the first evidence that model disagreement upsamples worst-group data, enabling SELF to nearly match DFR on four well-established benchmarks across vision and language tasks with no group annotations and less than 3% of the held-out class annotations. Our code is available at https://github.com/tmlabonte/last-layer-retraining.Comment: NeurIPS 202

Echocardiographic assessment of the impact of cardiovascular risk factors on left ventricular systolic function in patients with acute myocardial infarction

Background: Objectives of current study were to determine the magnitude of left ventricular systolic dysfunction in patients with acute myocardial infarction in the rural sub-population of Uttar Pradesh in India and to evaluate the impact of cardiovascular risk factors on the risk of impairment of left ventricular systolic function. Methods: One hundred and fifty seven consecutive patients with first acute myocardial infarction were enrolled into the study. Most patients were male (73.2%) and the mean age of presentation was 52.7 years. Two dimensional echocardiography was utilized to assess conventional parameters such as Left Ventricular End-Diastolic Diameter (LVEDD), Left Ventricular End-Systolic Diameter (LVESD), LV End-Diastolic Volume (LVEDV), LV End-Systolic Volume (LVESV) and Left Ventricular Ejection Fraction (LVEF). The LV volumes (end-systolic and end-diastolic) and LVEF were calculated from the conventional apical two-and four-chamber images using the biplane Simpson’s technique. LV systolic function was considered depressed when LVEF was less than 45%. The chi-square test was used in the statistical analysis to compare proportions and a logistic regression model was used to assess the independent effect of the each variable.Results:The study projects a high proportion (42.7% of the patient population) of left ventricular systolic dysfunction in patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI). No association was found between gender or age and LV systolic dysfunction. The proportion of patients with diabetes mellitus was higher in the sub-group of patients with impaired LV systolic function (45.2% vs. 30.2%, P = 0.01); the proportion of patients with history of current or past smoking was also higher in the sub-group of patients with impaired LV systolic function (48.9% vs. 34.2%, P = 0.03). On the other hand, hypertension and dyslipidemia were not associated with impaired LVEF. After adjustment of other variables, diabetes and smoking were associated with a significantly higher risk of LV systolic dysfunction (diabetes: OR = 3.73; 95% CI = 1.25-11.16; smoking: OR = 3.8; 95% CI = 1.37-11.05).Conclusion:Since the proportion of patients with LV systolic dysfunction in patients with AMI remains relatively high, LV systolic function variables such as LVEF and LVESV should be echocardiographically evaluated in all patients with AMI. Since the post-infarction LV systolic function remains the single most important determinant of survival, treatment of AMI patients should be aimed at limitation of infarct size and prevention of ventricular dilation. Moreover, cardiovascular risk factors such as diabetes mellitus and smoking have a significant impact on the likelihood of impairment of LV systolic function in patients with AMI and hence could influence long-term prognosis.

Efficacy of Laccases Obtained from the White Rot Basidiomycete \u3cem\u3eSchizophyllum commune\u3c/em\u3e-NI 07 in Enhancing the \u3cem\u3ein Vitro\u3c/em\u3e Digestibility of Crop Residues for Ruminants

Crop residues like maize stover, finger millet straw, wheat straw, rice straw, etc. generally constitute the main dietary component for animals. The rumen microbial utilization of these crop residues is hindered by the presence of lignin, which limits its overall digestion process and can significantly influence animal performance, because it is resistant to most of the enzymatic hydrolysis by microorganisms. In nature lignin is degraded by lignolytic enzymes of white rot fungi (WRF). These residues can thus be converted into high quality feed by means of fungal delignification improving their nutritive value. Fungal ligninolysis breaks down the cellulose-hemicellulose matrix liberating degradable components utilizable by rumen microflora. Earlier we reported on the enhancement in digestibility of ragi straw with lignolytic enzyme extracts. Laccase is one amongst these lignolytic enzymes holding immense potential in biodelignification of crop residues (Sridhar et al., 2014). However, its low level in the native state limits its practical use in the degradation of lingo cellulosics for ruminants necessitating the need for enhancing production. In the current work we report the efficacy of laccases isolated from Schizophyllum commune, in enhancing in vitro digestibility of some commonly used crop residues for ruminants

Effectiveness of an Educational Interactive Video-DVD on Dairy Health Management Practices in Terms of Knowledge Gain among Dairy Farmers

This study was undertaken with the goal of improving the Indian dairy sector by enhancing knowledge and skill among dairy farmers on animal health care; thereby enabling increased productivity and minimizing economic loss. The study focused on members of milk co-operative societies of Kannur district, Kerala, India. Though the milk co-operatives were organized institutions, they lacked much needed knowledge and skill enhancement of their member-farmers. Most rural households in Kerala own television sets and DVD players. Hence, an educational interactive video-DVD on dairy health management practices was considered as an appropriate medium to disseminate knowledge on dairy health management practices to them. Sixty dairy farmers owning a DVD player and a television were selected as the sample population for study by means of proportionate random sampling among four milk co-operative societies identified in Kannur block. The findings of the study revealed that the majority of the respondents possessed medium level of knowledge at the pre-exposure stage, while in the post-exposure stage, a majority rose to the high knowledge category. The respondents who had low knowledge regarding various livestock diseases, their causes, symptoms, prevention and control gained considerable knowledge after exposure to the educational interactive video-DVD. The difference observed between the mean scores of knowledge level of respondents in pre and post-exposure stages was found to be statistically significant