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STROKE! it may turn out to be silent spot killer; at the best it leaves one like vegetables! Treated but not cured, the attack of stroke can be suspended but the damage can hardly be reversed. Could we identify the early warning, many lives could be saved much damages could be avoided. Here are some ways.................. STROKE:  Remember the 1st Three Letters.....  S. T. R. STROKE IDENTIFICATION: During a BBQ, a woman stumbled and took a little fall - she assured everyone that she was fine (they offered to call paramedics) ....she said she had just tripped over a brick because of her new shoes. They got her cleaned up and got her a new plate of food. While she appeared a bit shaken up, Jane went about enjoying herself the rest of the evening. Jane's husband called later telling everyone that his wife had been taken to the hospital - (at 6:00 PM Jane passed away). She had suffered a stroke at the BBQ. Had they known how to identify the signs of a stro...

I took note of a surprising news on pollutions, that too in one of the great metro city in India, Kolkata. It appears that ' Dal Mill " owners have taken a holiday from any directive of pollution control. In India, there is nothing that does not go in connivance with the enforcing authority. Because in that case both the parties benefit. Of course at the cost of public in general, and in this case the public health is put under hazards; not to say about those labors who work in those mills. Just log into the story published in this blog Opinions & Views .

The articles related to blood transfusion and hepatitis B infection have been published in three installments earlier and now being concluded. Any one interested to get any such article written as this may write to kamalkali1962@yahoo.com . A critical evaluation the laboratory tests that are available for testing blood donations for the presence of anti-HBc. Among anti-HBc assays there are nine assays which are used by the laboratories across the world. These nine assays are divided into two groups; competitive and non-competitive. The competitive assays are Murex, AxSYM, PRISM® HBcore, PRISM® HBc, COBAS Immulite and the non-competitive assays are ADVIA and Ortho. The choice of assays depend upon the suitability of its use varies from one medical community to other and the cost factors matter too. However, in case blood transfusion, with its social objectives in mind, most of the developed and developing nations opt for those assays which are cost effective and dependab...

Continued from Part - I & II .......... In transfusion medicine safety of blood products is a major concern. The hepatitis B virus getting transmitted through blood transfusion is far more than the hepatitis C virus it is around 1:60000 vs 1:103000 (Schreiber, Busch, Kleinman, Korelitz. 1996). This is despite of availability of assay for screening quite sensitive to detect hepatitis B virus surface antigen or HBsAg. It is very common incidence of hepatitis B infection in post-transfusion cases (Saraswat, Banerjee, Chaudhury, Mahant,Khandekar, Gupta, et al.1996). Common explanations what offered for incorrect negative findings or results with the common assays are due to circulation of viral protein in low level. This can escape detection and screening of HBsAg mutant`s infection by assays in blood donors. Obviously this cause hazards in post blood transfusion (Jongerius, Wester, Cuypers, van Oostendorp,Lelie, van der Poel, et al.1998). Besides this other reason is cited ...

The studies observed that more than 300 million people all over the world are infected by hepatitis B virus. This virus belongs to Hepadnaviridae family, a non-cytopathic hepatotropic DNA virus. Though there is a prophylactic vaccine deemed to be effective still the high prevalence of this virus is found in continents like Africa and Asia (Lok,. & McMahon, 2001). Hepatitis B virus induces the liver ailments, the degree of which varies from person to person ((Ganem & Prince, 2004). The effects of infections by hepatitis B virus are controlled efficiently and cleared from the blood without any symptom or clinical evidence of liver disease by some persons. They may have inflammation severely in the liver i.e. acute hepatitis but after being resolved leave no long term squeal. There are others who cannot clear the virus and likely to develop a chronic infection but most of them may remain without any symptom and any acute liver disease, around 10 to 30 per cent of them con...

Blood transfusion is not always safe for the recipients. In most of the countries , standard tests those are conducted to detect any infection in donor's blood are not full proof. I wrote an article on this for someone but the article remained with me for some reason. I would like to share the information it has with you. Since the article is long enough , I am going to publish it in few installments. INTRODUCTION Hepatitis B is the dreaded disease, especially when it is transmitted through blood received from donation. The detection of hepatitis B in blood became easy when hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) was discovered. This helped decrease the occurrence of hepatitis in post-transfusion scenario. As such this has been a major breakthrough to arrest the spread of hepatitis B through blood transfusion. This helped the detection of hepatitis B ‘e’ antigen, hepatitis B core antigen (anit-HBc) and HBsAg as well. The common method of detecting hepatitis B infection is scr...

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is disease found in 8 to 10% school going children. The boys are three times more susceptible to this syndrome than girls, reason is not known yet. Diagnosing ADHD; sans any clinical tests like other common diseases. Clinical judgment taking into account of all symptoms associated with ADHD is the method of diagnosing ADHD. Doctors need to collect information from both the parents and the teachers. Children with ADHD act without thinking. They may understand how they are expected to do but may not be able to act accordingly. They are inattentive, cannot sit idle; at the same time know not what to do. Of course all the kids behave sometimes this way but not all the time. With their growing age they gradually get collected and settled. ADHD is diagnosed when such behavioral pattern prolongs for long time and does not show the sign to recede. The symptoms of ADHD may be absent in doctor’s chamber. The children face different challenges at h...