The Haryana Government would provide free of cost medical treatment to students up to 18 years of age enrolled in all government schools and Anganwari centres under the Indira Bal Swasthya Yojna (IBSY). The scheme would also include treatment for cancer and heart ailments, National Rural Health Mission Director Rakesh Gupta said in a meeting today to prepare a blueprint for better execution of IBSY in the state. Under this scheme, children would be given treatment at the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Rohtak, Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh and other major health care institutes. IBSY being run by Health Department could be given a new dimension with the help of Sarva Sikhsha Abhiyan and Education Department to improve the level of health of children between 0 and 18 years, he said. Gupta said the children would be diagnosed for anaemia and this work would be carried out jointly by the Education and Health departments. For this, teachers would be trained at the block level to examine children and laboratory technicians of the Health Department would visit the schools to check the level of haemoglobin in children. If the level is low, after examination by a doctor the child would be given a dose of Iron-Folic Acid tablets free of cost. Gupta said if any child is found suffering from severe anaemia, he/she would be referred to a health institute for free and better treatment there. Under this scheme eyes of children would also be checked, and if needed, free spectacles would be provided to them. In addition to it, he said, differently abled children would be diagnosed by doctors and they will be provided with Disability Certificate after evaluation of their capabilities, besides free remedial surgery, he added.

It may look disgusting, but scientists believe this worm could hold the key to battling a range of debilitating eye diseases.

The planarian flatworm is able to recreate missing parts of its body, even as adults, and it has been studied intensely by researchers.

They have now decoded the full genome of the worm's eye - and believe it could play a 'starring role' as a model for studying eye development and eye diseases, according to the journal, Cell Reports.

Professor Peter Reddien, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said: 'It's exciting to get this complete list of genes in one fell swoop.

'This provides perhaps the most comprehensive list of genes involved in eye biology in a model system other than Drosophila that can be used for rapidly studying the function of those genes.'

The most studied previous model for eye development were the compound eyes of fruit flies, as their genes are well documented.

But the worms present a new line of research.

Prof Reddien, along with graduate student Sylvain Lapan, analysed more than 2,000 planarian eyes, finding 600 active genes and studying 200 of them in more detail.

Several of the identified genes are known to have versions that play a role in the vertebrate eye but have not been found in the fruit fly eye.

Among these are genes involved in eye development and others associated with age-related macular degeneration and Usher syndrome, a disorder that causes progressive retinal degradation.

A key gene is the transcription factor ovo, which activates the expression of many other genes as the eye forms.

It had not been associated with eyes until the latest study, and was found to be vital for eye generation in planarian worms.

When ovo is experimentally turned off, planarians with head amputations cannot regenerate their eyes and eyes of otherwise normal adult planarians vanish after a couple months.

Ms Lapan said: 'Similar mechanisms are used to make eyes during homeostasis, regeneration, and embryonic development in planarians.

'We now know way more about genes that regulate eye formation in these animals than for any invertebrate other than Drosophila.

Planarian eyes are very different from fly eyes, and we're already seeing the benefits of studying diverse model species, like the discovery of a critical role for ovo.'

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a chronic condition that affects millions of children and often persists into adulthood

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a chronic condition that affects millions of children and often persists into adulthood.

ADHD includes some combination of problems, such as difficulty sustaining attention, hyperactivity and impulsive behaviour.

Children with ADHD also may struggle with low self-esteem, troubled relationships and poor performance in school.

While treatment won't cure ADHD, it can help a great deal with symptoms. Treatment typically involves medications and behavioural interventions.

A diagnosis of ADHD can be scary, and symptoms can be a challenge for parents and children alike. However, treatment can make a big difference, and most children with ADHD grow up to be normal adults.

ADHD has been called attention-deficit disorder (ADD) in the past. But, ADHD is now the preferred term because it describes both primary aspects of the condition: inattention and hyperactive-impulsive behaviour.

While many children who have ADHD tend more toward one category than the other, most children have some combination of inattention and hyperactive-impulsive behaviour.

ADHD symptoms become more apparent during activities that require focused mental effort.

In order to be diagnosed with ADHD, signs and symptoms of the disorder must appear before the age of 7.

In some children, signs of ADHD are noticeable as early as 2 or 3 years of age.

Twitter may already be used to plan social lives, interact with celebrities and communicate with friends.

But now a researcher believes the social networking site could have a far more serious use - tracking disease.

Researchers have already used the site to track flu as it spreads through New York using a 'heatmap' of users who complain of being ill.

Adam Sadilek at the University of Rochester and his team analyzed 4.4 million GPS-tagged Tweets from over 600,000 users in New York City over the course of one month in 2010.

They trained their artificial intelligence algorithm to ignore tweets by healthy people such as those claiming they were 'sick' of a particular song, and trained it to find those who were really ill.

Sadilek says the key to his system is friendships.

'Given that three of your friends have flu-like symptoms, and that you have recently met eight people, possibly strangers, who complained about having runny noses and headaches, what is the probability that you will soon become ill as well?' he said.

'Our models enable you to see the spread of infectious diseases, such as flu, throughout a real-life population observed through online social media.'

The tweets were plotted on a map, and used to predict when a particular users was at high risk of getting ill.

'We apply machine learning and natural language understanding techniques to determine the health state of Twitter users at any given time,' Mr Sadilek said.

'Since a large fraction of tweets is geo-tagged, we can plot them on a map, and observe how sick and healthy people interact.

'Our model then predicts if and when an individual will fall ill with high accuracy, thereby improving our understanding of the emergence of global epidemics from people's day-to-day interactions.'

The heatmaps show a city going through a flu epidemic.

The more red an area is, the more people are afflicted by flu at that location.

'We show emergent aggregate patterns in real-time, with second-by-second resolution,' boasted Sadilek.

'By contrast, previous state-of-the-art methods (including Google Flu Trends and government data) entail time lags from days to years.'

The algorithm looked not just at users' friends' health, but also strangers in the same area.

The algorithm was correct 90 percent of the time and about eight days in advance, the team said.

In unpublished findings described to New Scientist during an interview at the Conference on Artifical Intelligence in Toronto, Canada,the team also revealed that people who go to the gym regularly are moderately less likely to get sick.

People with low socio-economic status, on the other hand, are much more likely to become ill.

A scientific discovery made at the University of South Alabama College of Medicine has helped launch a new biotech company in Mobile.

The business, Exscien -- which in Latin means 'for science' -- was recently awarded a grant by the National Institutes of Health to support the development of a new drug aimed at preventing and reversing acute lung injury.

Led by Steve and Christine Cumbie, the biotech company's co-founder is Dr. Mark Gillespie, a professor and member of the Center for Lung Biology at USA's College of Medicine.

Medical school staffers are collaborating with Exscien in an effort to quickly develop the treatments that initially will be used in lung transplantation surgeries.

There are no drugs available to effectively manage acute lung injury, Gillespie said, adding that the condition can complicate medical disorders ranging from trauma and infection to transplants.

The $148,000 grant will help fund research to examine the effectiveness of a drug in increasing the number of lungs available for transplant and in reducing lung rejection, school officials said.

Gillespie said most lungs available for transplant arent used, sometimes because of concerns that they will fail after transplantation. As a result, of the 14,000 or so people waiting for a lung transplant in the U.S., only about 2,500 surgeries are performed each year.

Maneuvering through the heavy lifting of basic research to the expensive proposition of drug trials is a daunting task, Gillespie said. Because of the high cost of medical trials, many new drugs and other therapies never make it to market.

The concept behind this new therapy to treat injured lungs has been at least a decade in the making. About 10 years of basic research by USA investigators pointed to the idea that the new drug, when administered to donor lungs, could increase the number of lungs available to be safely transplanted by treating them prior to a transplantation.

Gillespie said he hopes the drug will eventually be used to target a major complication of lung transplantation called primary graft dysfunction, an issue that arises when the lung fails within the first two days after being transplanted.

In the past decade, multiple studies by Gillespie and colleague Dr. Glenn Wilson showed that damage to the DNA of mitochondria known as the powerhouse of a cell functions like a fuse box, killing off lung cells in various diseases when a bad cell is detected.

This new drug targets a repair enzyme to fix the DNA and protect the lung cells from injury, Gillespie said. It has real potential to emerge as a treatment for acute lung injury.

During the first year of the grant, researchers hope to verify the effectiveness of the drug.

If all goes as planned, the researchers should be ready to begin experimenting in lung transplant patients in as soon as two years, Gillespie said.

The FDA and good science requires that it be tested in animal models and also tested in human lungs that cannot be used for transplant because they are too diseased, he said. If that happens, we are a very short step away from launching clinical trials.

Most of development and research, including the manufacturing processes to make the drug, will take place in Mobile, Gillespie said.

The grant and new company are developments that emerged from an earlier five-year grant of about $1.75 million awarded by NIH to a team of pulmonary scientists at USA's Center for Lung Biology.

That grant was recently renewed to examine the causes and consequences of pneumonia. Its stuff like this, Gillespie said, that keeps you passionate and excited about your job.