8Jun-The-Sting-Operation.Pdf

PANDORA’S BOX Global Vistas Around the world in health & medicine…01 Arbor Vitae The Poet behind the Plasmodium…02 Memory Invigoration Let’s tickle the baby!...03 Been There, Done That! Make the right move, decide now…04 EduO…05 THE PARCHMENT The Rendezvous – Dr. Vandana Jain…06 Worst Case Scenario First Aid Management…08 GREETINGS FROM LEXICON! History Revisited It is with great pleasure that I announce that Lexicon is X-Ray: A look inside…09 BACK! After a quarterly hiatus where we dabbled with Cerebro the blogging world, Lexicon has officially re-launched The Vector Sector…10 its eighth edition. With an ever-growing team of Do you know your vectors well?...12 ardent Lexiconians, new and innovative elements, an LexiGyaan by LexiAmma entire section devoted to recognizing mavens in the Natural Mosquito Repellants…14 field of medicine (Med Marvels), a quirky, fun but LexiAmma Busts Dental Myths…14 wise lady – Lexi Amma – who finally accepted our Health Dotes…14 infinite proposal to share her know-how with our dear LexiAmma’s Guide for a Vegan Diet…15 readers, an interview with the eminent Dr. Vandana Jain, Lexicon’s return has surely resounded with a The New Truth bang! Tackling vector borne diseases…16 It’s Raining Men!...17 With the advent of the monsoon, our theme this time The impact of climate change on vector borne diseases…18 is to do with WHO’s venture on vector-borne Advances in the treatment & control of Lieshmaniansis..19 diseases. In line with the World Health Organisation’s Antimicrobial resistance- The role of med school…20 initiative to raise awareness and implement salutary guidelines on their prevention, our team has put Med Marvels together a series of advisory pieces on insidious Dr. Edmond Fernandes…21 transmitters of disease. An exposition on the impact Dr. Shwetha Mangalesh…22 of climate change, genetically modified mosquitoes, Dr. Carl Britto…23 advances in the treatment of leishmaniasis, surveying Dr. Soumyadeep Bhaumik…24 CDC’s surveillance system – ArboNet and many more! Dr. Subrahmanyam Karuturi…25 With this issue, Lexicon aims to elucidate diagnostic as well as therapeutic tools employed in vector- The Sting Operation control, and key prevention strategies. So put on Feelings of the flea…26 Rise of the rodent army…27 protective gear! It’s time for: The mighty mite…28 Tick me not!...29 The Sting Operation Acts of Kindness Tackling Vector-Borne Healthy is Happy- The medical wing of BTL…30 Dr. Siloo Bhagwager…32 Diseases Tech-X “Your breath smells of cancer”…33 sTMS: Goodbye Migraines?...34 Trusha Taneja Known Case Of Director of Edition (DE) Two rare and scientific cases…35 The Boards of Lexicon…38 Global Vistas Around the world in health & medicine By Dr.Supriya Kumar Lugansk State Medical University, Ukraine No More Pricks – Say Goodbye to Unnecessary Health Checks June, 2014: An initiative entitled SLIM (Society for Less Investigative Medicine) has been launched by top- ranking cardiologists of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Based on several worldwide studies, it has been established that regular health check-ups and diagnostic tests are unnecessary and only add to medical costs and expenses. Prof. Balram Bhargav, an AIIMS cardiologist has spearheaded the SLIM mission and propagates the need to bring in a checklist of symptoms that call for medical tests. Trending in the World of Genome Editing – CRISPR June, 2014: The 1998 discovery of RNA interference (RNAi) provided scientists with a powerful tool to target and switch off the expression of particular genes to unravel their function. But RNAi can be imprecise, causing unintended “off-target” silencing of genes, and the technique can be time-consuming and cumbersome to employ in experiments. Other methods, such as zinc-finger proteins, have similar limitations. To the rescue come CRISPRs (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a gene-editing system that could revolutionize everything, from disease treatment to plant biology. The technique involves programming an RNA guide molecule to target a section of defective DNA and replace it with “good” DNA. Defeating the Superbugs: New Inventions to Kill Drug-Resistant Disease June, 2014: The ominous decline of traditional antibiotics, together with the growing knowledge of good bacteria, has inspired a new wave of research into therapies that target and kill only disease-causing bugs. California-based biotech company, AvidBiotics uses genetic engineering techniques to tweak toxic compounds so that they specifically target one dangerous pathogen, like C. difficile or Escherichia coli O157:H7 strain that cause bloody diarrhea and sometimes, fatal kidney failure. James J. Collins et. al., Boston University are engineering a biological circuit into lactobacillus so that it responds to signaling molecules produced by the cholera bug with a toxin that targets and kills the microbe. A company AmpliPhi Biosciences has developed an inhaled phage cocktail for drug-resistant P. aeruginosa, a stubborn bacteria that infects the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis. The mix was successful in mice, and the company plans to launch a trial in humans this year. The Mosquito Solution June, 2014: Dengue fever infects millions and kills tens of thousands of people around the world each year. But an Australian-led program is showing positive signs of turning this brutal disease into a bite-sized issue. A mosquito infected with wolbachia bacteria has been effectively disarmed. Although it will still bite and probe human skin for blood, it can no longer transmit the dengue virus from human to human. And best of all, these infected mosquitoes pass the neutralising wolbachia bacteria on to future generations of mosquitoes, eventually rendering entire populations harmless. Measles making life difficult for US Citizens! May, 2014: Cases of measles have hit a 20-year high in the United States, driven largely by the North-Central Ohio outbreak among the Amish. As of May 23, 288 cases had been reported nationwide. The last time the year-to-date tally was higher was in 1994, when there were 764 cases. The importance of vaccination is being imposed on the healthy population as a means to contain the disease. 1 ARBOR VITAE The Poet behind the Plasmodium: Remembering the Legend! By Dr. Anirban Chatterjee KLE Institute of Dental Sciences- Belgaum “This day relenting God Hath placed within my hand A wondrous thing; and God Be praised. At his command, Seeking his secret deeds With tears and toiling breath, I find thy cunning seeds, O million-murdering Death. I know this little thing A myriad men will save, O Death, where is thy sting? Thy victory, O Grave?” Although he had no predisposition to medicine, at the age of seventeen, Sir Ronald Ross submitted to his father’s wish to see him enter the Indian Medical Service. And from then on, there was no looking back for this remarkable man, who was also a mathematician, epidemiologist, sanitarian, editor, novelist, dramatist, and a romantic poet. Born in Almora in 1857, a cantonment town in North India, Sir Ronald Ross was the progeny of an Indian Army General, Sir C. C. G. Ross and his wife Matilda. It was when Sir Ross was eight years old, that he was sent to the United Kingdom to be educated. Much like a boarding school, very similar to a young Peter Parker (of Spiderman fame), he spent most of his childhood with an aunt and uncle on the largest island of England, the Isle of Wight. An enthusiastic mathematician who had an inclination for puzzling theorems and amusing statistics and one who had never dreamt of becoming a medical practitioner, accidentally researched an arthropod, designed and customized some of the most valuable experiments with sheer instincts and optimism. His own calculated observations and estimates ultimately won him the second ever Nobel Prize in Medicine in the year 1902, having faced a lot of bureaucratic hindrance and encumbrance. Here’s a tribute to the magic man of medicine! Young Ross: At the age of eight, Sir Ross was sent to England for education. He knew not much back then about malaria; all he witnessed was his father falling prey to this horrendous pathology. Despite being eloquent with numbers and sketches, young Ross joined St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in 1875 as suggested by his father. Not very surprisingly, he was never among the ones to be on distinction with scores. For his first shot, he flunked the examinations for the Indian Medical Service, which was when his father threatened to cancel his monthly pocket expenses. He then took up work as a ship’s surgeon voyaging between London and New York. In 1881, on his second attempt for the qualifying examination, he ranked seventeenth out of twenty- two successful candidates. After four months’ training at the Army Medical School, Ronald Ross finally levelled up to his father’s dream by entering the Indian Medical Service in 1881. Madras and Malaria: SirRoss was appointed for the Madras service out of the three Indian Presidencies. With single-minded devotion, he toiled away in Mysore and Madras and also served in one of the longest running civil wars of Burma and in the Andaman Islands. While in Madras, a major part of his work was concentrated on treating soldiers infected with malaria. In Bangalore, while working for the post of Acting Garrison Surgeon, he noticed that there seemed to be more mosquitoes in his bungalow than in others and that there was a particularly large swarm around a barrel with water that was kept outside the window. Upon observation, the barrel was found to contain numerous squirming worms, which he described as mosquito larvae. Eventually he did develop some interest in tropical diseases, like all his seniors would have during the period when these were endemic in most parts of India, particularly the ailment malaria that killed innumerable each year.

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