HAIR DYE- AN EMERGING SUICIDAL AGENT: OUR EXPERIENCE

Hair dye poisoning has been emerging as one of the important causes of intentional deliberate self harm. To study the epidemiology of patients who consumed Super Vasmol (a commonly used commercial hair dye), profile of patients referred to the ENT department, to find the effectiveness of supportive therapy and to compare between the tracheostomy and the non tracheostomy group, a retrospective study was conducted inpatients who consumed Super Vasmol admitted over a year (April 2009 – March 2010) in a teaching hospital in South India. Out of the 108 patients 38 (35.2%) were males and 70 (64.8%) were females. 42 (38.9%) were in 21-25 age group. Patients who developed cervico-facial oedema, throat pain, burning sensation in the throat, change of voice, no voice and dyspnoea with stridor were referred to the ENT Department. 74 (68.5%) patientsneeded an ENT opinion. Cervico-facial oedema was the main clinical manifestation in 74 patients. 33 of themunderwent tracheostomy. The mortality in 108 patients was 22.2% and after tracheostomy 21.2%. Purpose of thestudy is to create public awareness about the lethal effects of the hair dye, because it is a major health problem and to educate the public and the medical professional about the need for aggressive and early treatment.

Flowcytometry – A rapid tool to correlate functional activities of human peripheral blood lymphocytes with their corresponding phenotypes after in vitro stimulation

Background: While dealing with mixed in vitro lymphocyte cultures one is faced with the problem of relative contributions of different populations to the activity being studied. This is especially true in the controversy relating to the contributions of lymphocyte sub-populations to the Lymphokine Activated Killer (LAK) phenomenon. Flowcytometry can be used to highlight relative contributions of lymphocyte subpopulations towards LAK activity without resorting to difficult purification strategies. We set up long-term in vitro lymphocyte cultures, stimulated them with cytokines IL-2/ IL-12, recorded their phenotypic changes and cytotoxic activity against U-937 tumor targets. Results: The results indicated that natural killer cells (NK) constituted the predominant proliferating cell population in the cytokine stimulatedcultures. Flowcytometric evidence revealed that CD56+ T cells contributed little to LAK activity against U937 target cells as compared to cells with NK phenotype which were predominantly responsible for spontaneous killing of the tumor targets. The two cytokines, IL-2 and IL-12, had an additive effect on cell proliferation and spontaneous cytotoxicity. Conclusion: Flowcytometry can be used to rapidly delineate phenotypic changes in immune cells after stimulation and simultaneously correlate them with corresponding functional activity. This approach may find application as a initial screening tool for studying different types of cells in mixed cultures and their respective activities under stimulatory / inhibitory conditions

Competition between Superconductivity and Charge Density Wave Ordering in the Lu5_5Ir4_4(Si1−x_{1-x}Gex_x)10_{10} Alloy System

We have performed bulk measurements such as dc magnetic susceptibility, electrical resistivity and heat capacity on the pseudo-ternary alloys Lu$_5$Ir$_4$(Si$_{1-x}$Ge$_x$)$_{10}$ to study the interplay and competition between superconductivity and the charge density wave (CDW) ordering transition. We track the evolution of the superconducting transition temperature T$_{SC}$ and the CDW ordering temperature T$_{CDW}$ as a function of x (concentration of Ge) ($0.0 \leq x\leq~1.0$). We find that increasing x (increasing disorder) suppresses the T$_{CDW}$ rapidly with the concomitant increase in T$_{SC}$. We present a temperature-concentration (or volume) phase diagram for this system and compare our results with earlier work on substitution at the Lu or Ir site to show how dilution at the Si site presents a different situation from these other works. The heat capacity data in the vicinity of the CDW transition has been analyzed using a model of critical fluctuations in addition to a mean-field contribution and a smooth lattice background. We find that the critical exponents change appreciably with increasing disorder. This analysis suggests that the strong-coupling and non mean-field like CDW transition in the parent compound Lu$_5$Ir$_4$Si$_{10}$ changes to a mean-field like transition with increasing Ge concentration.Comment: 14 pages and 8 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

How well do India's social service programs serve the poor?

Reaching India's poor calls for greatly improved social service delivery systems, better targeting of the poor, more coordination between agencies, policies aimed at income generation, and more involvement of the poor and of nongovernmental organizations. The authors of this paper found that India's social services were used relatively little by the poor. The health and education of the poor has improved but not as much for the population as a whole. The reasons that all social service programs did so little to alleviate poverty are similar. Physical access to education and health services has improved but inequalities exist because of biases in locating facilities. The access of the poor to housing, social security, and social welfare services has been limited because these services were inadequate relative to needs and because services leak to the nonpoor. Social service policies are not comprehensive enough and the quality of services is low. Issues common to the social sector delivery systems are weak management, ineffective targeting, and inflexible service delivery systems that result in a mismatch between perceived needs and services delivered. The bureaucracy is inadequate to reach the poor. Existing capacity and resources are inadequate, particularly for education and health.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Assessment,Safety Nets and Transfers,Rural Poverty Reduction

AN EFFECT OF CARDIOPROTECTIVE ACTIVITY IN VARIOUS MEDICINAL PLANTS–A REVIEW

Siddha system of medicines is known for its herbal in origin. Herbal plays a major role in treating acute and chronic diseases. Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) is the life-threatening disease that contributes a leading cause of death day by day across the world. A change in lifestyle modification is the one of the risks of CVDs. This review paper attempts to facilitate the cardioprotective activity by providing different types of medicinal plants and its botanical distribution, description, chemical constituents and pharmacological activity. Few important herbs will protect the human being from CVDs and gives health and quality of life. In this paper, the authors explores the effect of cardioprotective activity in medicinal plants as follows, Terminalia chebula (Kadukkai), Piper longum (Thippili), Zingiber officinale (Inji), Tinospora cordifolia (Seenthil), Asparagus racemosus (Thanneervitan), Embelia ribes (Vaaivilangam), Andrographis paniculata (Nilavembu), Nelumbo nucifera (Thaamarai), Allium sativum (Vellaipoondu), Bauhinia variegata (Mantharai)

Inverter current control for reactive power compensation in solar grid system using Self-Tuned Fuzzy Logic Controller

The solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have gained more attention in renewable energy production due to their cost efficiency and reliability. Typically, reactive power compensation and harmonics elimination are challenging and demanding tasks for improving the efficacy of grid-connected solar PV systems. For this purpose, many research works developed different converter and controller topologies for solving the power quality issues in grid-PV systems. But, it limits the problems of increased harmonics, computation complexity, inefficiency and reduced performance outcomes. Thus, this research aims to develop an integrated hysteresis current controller and Self-Tuned Fuzzy Logic (SFLC) based MPPT controllers for eliminating the harmonics and unbalanced current in single-phase grid systems. Also, it helps to extract the maximum amount of power from the solar PV array. The LUO converter is deployed to reduce ripple contents. The Phased Locked Loop (PLL) based synchronization is performed to maintain the phase angle, frequency and magnitude levels of source power. Moreover, the hysteresis current controller for the inverter has been specifically designed to reduce the THD of the system under IEEE519_1992 regulations. During experiments, both the simulation and hardware results have been evaluated for validating the performance of the proposed controller design

Reduced Cytokine Secretions by LAK Cells of Pulmonary Tuberculosis Patients in Response to Tumor Targets In Vitro

Activation of macrophages and other immune components to release a series of proinflammatory cytokines is one of the first events in innate resistance to intracellular infections. Severe manifestations of tuberculosis (TB) could be caused by alterations in the balance of these cytokines. In this study, lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) cells of TB patients and normal individuals were generated by stimulation with cytokines in vitro. The LAK cells of both groups were further triggered with allogeneic tumor targets. Cytokines interferon-g (IFN-g), tumor necrosis factor-a (TNF-a), and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) were estimated in the supernatants generated in the two groups. The aim was to see if infection with TB influenced the secretory capacity of the immune cells in vitro. Reduced cytokine profiles were observed in TB patients, indicating defective interactions between patient effector cells with allogeneic transformed cells compared with normal individuals. Partial restoration of IFN-g production was seen with a combination of cytokines interleukin-2 (IL-2) and IL-12 in TB patients. Based on the in vitro observations, we hypothesize that in vivo also there is diminished immune cell activation of effector cells in response to the presence of infected macrophages. This probably leads to a diminished secretory function that can be corrected by the use of such cytokines as IL-2 and IL-12. The effector populations of TB patients are probably in a state of target-induced anergy, allowing the bacteria to thrive, and immunomodulatory cytokines that improve the host immune response toward countering mycobacterial infection