Feature Article

Millions of people, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, lack access to effective pharmaceuticals, often because they are unaffordable. The 2001 Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization (WTO) adopted the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) Agreement and Public Health. The declaration recognized the implications of intellectual property rights for both new medicine development and the price of medicines.

The objective of the study was to review policies on management of latent tuberculosis infection in countries with low and high burdens of tuberculosis.

Original Source

The present study was planned with an objective to detect the level of heavy metals in feathers of House Crow from agrifield areas of district Ludhiana and Sangrur. In feathers of House Crow, 8 heavy metals were detected through ICAP-AES, out of which As, Cd, Pb were heavy metals and Cr, Cu, Ni, Zn, Mn were essential elements. The concentration of all metals varied significantly at .05% level of significance among the different districts.

The management of terrestrial weed is of great concern for the scientific community as these weeds cause adverse effect in different ecosystems like forest, agriculture and urban. The widespread of these weeds by their adaptive capability and morphological advancement is difficult to control. Parthenium hysterophorous, Lantana camara, Saccharum spontaneum, Ageratum conyzoides are the weeds that spread all over the world. There are various management practices employed for the control of this weeds.

In middle Gangetic plain, high arsenic concentration is present in water, which causes a significant health risk. Total 48 morphologically distinct arsenite resistant bacteria were isolated from middle Gangetic plain. The minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values of arsenite varied widely in the range 1–15 mM of the isolates. On the basis of their MIC, two isolates, AK1 (KY569423) and AK9 (KY569424) were selected.

Original Source

Of patients with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR TB), <50% complete treatment. Most treatment failures for patients with MDR TB are due to death during TB treatment. We sought to determine the proportion of deaths during MDR TB treatment attributable to TB itself. We used a structured verbal autopsy tool to interview family members of patients who died during MDR TB treatment in India during January–December 2016.

False-negative results for Plasmodium falciparum histidine-rich protein (HRP) 2–based rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) are increasing in Eritrea. We investigated HRP gene 2/3 (pfhrp2/pfhrp3) status in 50 infected patients at 2 hospitals. We showed that 80.8% (21/26) of patients at Ghindae Hospital and 41.7% (10/24) at Massawa Hospital were infected with pfhrp2-negative parasites and 92.3% (24/26) of patients at Ghindae Hospital and 70.8% (17/24) at Massawa Hospital were infected with pfhrp3-negative parasites.

The existing treatment regime against tuberculosis is not adequate, and novel therapeutic interventions are required to target Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) pathogenesis. We report Pranlukast (PRK) as a novel allosteric inhibitor of Mtb's arginine biosynthetic enzyme, Ornithine acetyltransferase (MtArgJ). PRK treatment remarkably abates the survival of free as well as macrophage‐internalized Mtb, and shows enhanced efficacy in combination with standard‐of‐care drugs.

We examine the capability of thirteen Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) phase 5 (CMIP5) models in simulating climatology and interannual variability of Winter North Pacific Storm Track (WNPST). It is found that nearly half of the selected models can reproduce the spatial pattern of WNPST climatology. However, the strength and spatial variation of WNPST climatology are weak in most of the models.

Original Source

Hydrogeochemical investigations were carried out in semi-arid region of Basara to estimate the quality of groundwater for its suitability for domestic and agricultural purposes. For this region 34 groundwater samples were collected in different locations and analyzed for various ions, viz., Na+, Ca2+, Mg2+, K+, Cl−, HCO3−, SO42−, CO32−, HCO3−, NO3− and F− to assess the water chemistry with sodium absorption ratio, %Na, residual sodium carbonate, magnesium hazard.