Bacterial Meningitis can befatal. It can cause severe brain damage and, if untreated, can even lead to death. The disease is more common among children who inhabit crowded areas with poor sanitation and hygiene.

The good news is that Karnataka is one of the first four states where Haemophilus influenza Type B vaccine has been made mandatory. Talks are on and, shortly, the Union government is going to make Haemophilus influenza Type B vaccine compulsory under the National Immunisation Schedule, all over the country.

"This vaccine has about 80% efficacy. It is required to be given in four doses, with the first three at a gap of one-and-a-half to two months each and the fourth dose at the age of one-and-a-half years," said Dr Preethi Galagali, consultant pediatrician, Chord Road Hospital.

"Roughly, around 2% of children suffer from some form of meningitis. Though Haemophilus influenza Type B vaccine has been there for the last 18 years, it is only over the last five years that there has been an awareness about this vaccine, leading to reduction in the incidence of meningitis," said Dr Kishore Kumar, CEO and MD, Cloudnine and member of the Indian Academy of Pediatrics.

As many people age they complain about not being able to remember things - and rather than thinking the cause could be anything as sinister as the first signs of dementia, say they have simply accumulated too much in their minds over the decades.

Now scientists say there is evidence that their explanation is more than an excuse.

New research indicates older people are less able to process information - including remembering things - because their memories tend to be cluttered with masses of information.

Mervin Blair, a PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, led a study comparing how well people in their 20s and 60s recalled information.

He said: "Basically, older adults are less able to keep irrelevant information out of their consciousness, which then impacts on other mental abilities."

He and colleagues asked the two groups, each of about 30 people, to perform what he called a "working memory task".

This involved reading sentences and recalling parts of them accurately, including the last word in each.

"Overall, we showed that our older participants had reduced working memory compared to our younger participants," said Blair.

The two groups were also asked to memorise the order of a series of images and then tell researchers what that order was, while simultaneously being shown the images in a random order.

This "sequential memory task" was to examine how well participants could jettison irrelevant information and concentrate on the task at hand - technically called "inhibition deletion".

Blair said: "Older adults had poor inhibition, repeatedly responding to previously relevant images."

He suggested older people worried about mild memory lapses could improve their performance by "reducing clutter" through the use of "relaxation exercises".

He warned: "Reduce clutter, if you don't, you may not get anything done."

Karen Li, professor of psychology at Concordia, and the senior author of the study, commented: "Our study was novel because we looked at how the ability to recall and process information at the same time changes as people get older."

Gordon Wilcock, professor of geratology at Oxford University, and an expert on memory and ageing, welcomed the study for "suggesting mechanisms for phenomenae that trouble people".

He described it as "an interesting hypothesis", but added: "It doesn't fit will with other hypotheses that we have."

He also questioned whether the differences in results were truly explained by age.

Younger people might be better at this sort of memory retrieval because their brains had been primed to do so by early exposure to computer technology, he said, while members of the older group could have been on drugs for health conditions. The two groups should also be matched for IQ, he said.

It is true that medicines save lives, but the same might not apply to every 300th patient being admitted to a hospital. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one in 10 hospital admissions leads to an adverse event and one in 300 admissions in death.

Dr Nikhil Datar, a gynaecologist and health activist, was quoted as saying to a leading newspaper that "the brunt of this adverse event might range from a patient being asked to spend an extra day in the hospital or missing a dose of medicine. Unintended medical errors are a big threat to patient safety".

No Indian data is available on this topic, and the WHO has listed it among the top 10 killers in the world. While a British National Health System survey in 2009 reported that 15% of its patients were misdiagnosed, an American study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2000 quantified this problem most effectively.

It said that there are 2,000 deaths every year from unnecessary surgery; 7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals; 20,000 from other errors in hospitals; 80,000 from infections in hospitals; and 106,000 deaths every year from non-error, adverse effects of medications. In all, 225,000 deaths occur per year in the US due to unintentional medical errors.

Further, pointing towards the medical error cases being registered in the West, Dr Datar mentioned "in the Western nations, it is believed that the incidence of unintentional medical errors is between 10% and 17% of all cases".

The Indian government after realizing this concept, set up the National Initiative on Patient Safety in the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences a couple of years back.

Dr Akhil Sangal of the Indian Confederation for Healthcare Accreditation told a newspaper that "the idea is not to apportion blame. When medical negligence occurs, the first question to be asked is who is to blame. We instead have to evolve to a system in which we ask questions about how, when and where the negligence occurred".

Schizophrenia, a serious mental disorder that affects tens of millions of people worldwide, can be tackled through the amino acid L-lysine, a study suggests.

Preliminary research shows that patients who received L-lysine alongside their normal medication found some reduction in the severity of their symptoms.

These include poor concentration and memory, apathy, or a reduced ability to cope with social situations, the journal BMC Medicine reports.

Study leader Caroline Wass, pharmacologist at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, said: "This study suggests that L-lysine may be of benefit to patients in alleviating some of the negative and cognitive effects of schizophrenia."

In the study, a group of schizophrenic patients were given either six grams of L-Lysine or a placebo every day for four weeks, according to a Gothenburg statement.

Each of the patients had been on a stable dose of medication for the past three months and had been free from psychotic episodes for the two months before the study began.

They were tested for blood levels of lysine as well as the severity of their symptoms and functional ability at the start, after four, and after eight weeks.

The bulk of the patients responded to L-lysine treatment, as shown by an increase in blood lysine levels. Some of the patients reported that they felt an improvement.

It could be argued that a life free of lies and sarcasm would be a happier one. But the inability to recognize others' insincerity can also be hazardous - and a warning sign of a form of dementia.

Researchers have known for years that people with frontotemporal dementia - a type of dementia that affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain - often lose the ability to detect sarcasm and lies, while people who age normally don't experience this. (More on Time.com: Photos: My Aging Father's Decline: A Son's Photo Journal)

Because frontotemporal dementia affects regions of the brain involved in complex, higher-order processes like personality and behavior, patients may show certain striking symptoms like behaving in compulsive, socially inappropriate ways or suddenly changing religions. They also become gullible, as evidenced by the many patients who lose money to hucksters and scammers online.

What a team of researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, wanted to find out was the strength of the association between frontotemporal dementia and the failure to identify insincerity or deception. Would these deficits show up in patients whose brains scans suggested the mental disorder? And would the link be strong enough to identify those at risk?

The researchers asked 175 older adults, more than half of whom had some form of dementia, to watch a video of two people speaking. One of the speakers occasionally lied or used sarcasm - made clear by verbal and non-verbal cues. Viewers were then asked a series of yes or no questions about what they saw. Researchers also took MRI scans of the participants' brains. (More on TIME.com: Brain Exercises Delay, But Can't Prevent, Dementia)

Mentally healthy older participants had no problem identifying the speaker's lies and sarcasm. But those whose brain scans showed signs of frontotemporal dementia were blind to the deception. People with other types of dementia, including Alzheimer's, performed somewhat better on the lie-detecting task.

The study's authors concluded that the inability to perceive lies or sarcasm may help doctors identify patients with dementia, especially since other early behavioral warning signs tend to be overlooked, misdiagnosed as symptoms of depression, mid-life crisis or Alzheimer's. (More on TIME.com: Alzheimer's: Largely a Woman's Issue)

"We have to find these people early," said senior author and UCSF neuropsychologist Katherine Rankin in a press release, noting that early detection offers the best chance for intervention and treatment.

Frontotemporal dementia is rare, making up perhaps 5% of patients with dementia; by comparison, Alzheimer's disease accounts for nearly 80% of such patients. Frontotemporal dementia tends to occur at a younger age than Alzheimer's, typically between the ages of 40 and 70. (More on TIME.com: Cover Story: Alzheimer's Unlocked)

"If somebody has strange behavior and they stop understanding things like sarcasm and lies, they should see a specialist who can make sure this is not the start of one of these diseases," said Rankin.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Hawaii.