Swine flu claimed its first victim in India when a 14-year-old girl died of H1N1 infection at Pune’s Jahangir Hospital on Monday.

Seven more people — two in Delhi, three in Pune and one each in Chennai and Ahmedabad — tested positive for swine flu, taking India’s tally to 558 in the 79 days since the first case was reported in the country. Of these, 470 have recovered.

Jahangir Hospital did not give the name of the victim. Sources said her name was Ria Shaikh and she was from Pune.

She developed a sore throat, runny nose, headache and fever on July 21, but she went to a private doctor. He treated her for a cold and fever, and she returned to school on July 23.

The teenager again developed fever on July 25, for which she went to another private doctor. Since the fever did not respond to treatment, she was admitted to a private nursing home in Pune on July 27.

Her condition worsened and she was shifted to ICU and put on a ventilator on July 29.

“It is very unfortunate, she was brought for testing and treatment two weeks after she got infected,” said Vineet Chawdhry, joint secretary, ministry of health.

“They kept going to private doctors and her lung aspirate was finally sent to Pune’s National Institute of Virology (NIV) for testing on July 31, where she tested positive for swine flu. By then, it was too late.”

The girl did not respond to the anti-flu drug oseltamivir and died of multi-organ failure.
“This underlines the fact that people should go to a public health facility at once,” said Chawdhry.

“She had come in contact with 40 students who travelled to NASA in the US, and though she had not travelled herself, she got the infection from them.”

The Maharashtra government has assigned two Pune hospitals — Naidu Hospital and Yashwantrao Hospital — to treat swine flu patients.

It was not clear why Jahangir Hospital did not shift the girl to one of these hospitals despite the NIV confirming swine flu two days ago.

Over 50 million people in Central and Southern Asia* have asthma, and many do not have access to the medications that can control the disease, according to a report released today, World Asthma Day. The Global Burden of Asthma Report, which details the prevalence, morbidity, and mortality of asthma in 20 regions around the world, reveals a number of alarming facts about the burden of this chronic respiratory disease in Central and Southern Asia.

Due to rapid industrialization and urbanization throughout the region, the prevalence of asthma is predicted to increase rapidly in the coming years. The increase is likely to be particularly dramatic in India, which is projected to become the world's most populous nation by 2050. An absolute 2% increase in the prevalence of asthma in India would result in an additional 20 million people with the disease.

The prevalence of asthma in Central and Southern Asia ranges from 1.5% in Nepal to 4.6% in Uzbekistan - relatively low compared to some other parts of the world. However, the prevalence of asthma has increased markedly in recent years, with up to a threefold increase seen among children in Southern Asia over the last two decades.

Asthma is a chronic lung disease characterized by recurrent breathing problems and symptoms such as breathlessness, wheezing, chest tightness, and coughing. Asthma symptoms vary over time, and also differ in severity from one individual to another. When it is not effectively treated, asthma often leads to hospitalization, missed work and school, limitations on physical activity, sleepless nights and in some cases death.

Although asthma cannot be cured, effective medications to treat and manage the disease exist. One of the authors of the Global Burden of Asthma Report, Professor Richard Beasley, of the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand, says, "In Central and Southern Asia, effective asthma management is often limited by lack of availability or affordability of medications." In some areas widespread misconceptions about asthma and its treatment, and reluctance of patients to use the inhaler devices that are key to effective delivery of asthma medicines, also pose challenges. "Low-cost asthma education and management programs are needed to ensure that asthma care is available and affordable for all segments of the population in Central and Southern Asia," adds Professor Beasley.

The high levels of air pollution in Central and Southern Asia are also cause for concern. "The inhabitants of some Indian and Bangladeshi cities are exposed to some of the highest air pollution levels in the world," Professor Beasley says. "Air pollution can trigger asthma attacks, and can also worsen the symptoms of a variety of other respiratory diseases." Indoor air pollution, from burning biomass fuel for cooking and heating in poorly ventilated dwellings, also contributes to the burden of asthma and other respiratory diseases in the region.

Asthma is now one of the world's most common long-term conditions, according to the Global Burden of Asthma Report. The disease is estimated to affect as many as 300 million people worldwide - a number that could increase by a further 100 million by 2025.

The Global Burden of Asthma Report is a comprehensive survey of the prevalence and impact of asthma around the world, based on standardized data collected in epidemiology studies in more than 80 countries.

Researchers at Rutgers University in Newark and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a highly accurate method to peer into the brain.

This method can help uncover a person's mental state and determine what sort of information is being processed before it reaches conscious awareness.


The discovery of this new window into the brain has provided scientists with a means to develop a more accurate model of the inner functions of the brain.

Led by Stephen Jose Hanson
, a professor of Psychology at Rutgers, the study has provided direct evidence that a person's mental state can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The research has also suggested that a more comprehensive approach is needed to map brain activity, and that the widely held belief that localized areas of the brain are responsible for specific mental functions is misleading and incorrect.

In their analysis of global brain activity, the researchers found that different processing tasks have their own distinct pattern of neural connections stretching across the brain, similar to the fingerprints that distinctively identify each of us.

However, instead of being a static pattern, the brain is able to arrange and rearrange the connections based on the mental task being undertaken.

"You can't just pinpoint a specific area of the brain, for example, and say that is the area responsible for our concept of self or that part is the source of our morality.

It turns out the brain is much more complex and flexible than that. It has the ability to rearrange neural connections for different functions. By examining the pattern of neural connections, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy what mental processing task a person is doing," said Hanson.


The findings open up the possibility of categorizing a multitude of mental tasks with their unique pattern of neural circuitry, and also represent a potential first, early step in developing a means for identifying higher-level mental functions, such as 'lying' or abstract reasoning.

They potentially also could pave the way for earlier diagnosis and better treatment of mental disorders, such as autism and schizophrenia, by offering a means for identifying very subtle abnormalities in brain activity and synchrony.

The findings provide a more accurate direction for mapping the effective connectivity of the brain.

Known as the Connectome Project, the goal of researchers involved in the work is to provide a complete map of the neural circuitry of the central nervous system.

The study involved 130 participants, each of whom performed a different mental task, ranging from reading, to memorizing a list, to making complex decisions about whether to take monetary risks, while being scanned using fMRI.

By analyzing the participants' fMRI data against classifications developed from the fMRIs of other individuals, the researches could identify which of eight tasks participants were involved in with more than 80 percent accuracy.

The researchers could also identify what class of objects (faces, houses, animals, etc.) a person was viewing before he or she could report that information by analyzing the pattern of brain activity at the back of the brain where information is processed and then conveyed towards the frontal regions associated with awareness.

"What our research shows is that if you want to understand human cognitive function, you need to look at system-wide behavior across the entire brain. You can't do it by looking at single cells or areas. You need to look at many areas of the brain to even understand the simplest of functions," explained Hanson.

An international team of scientists and clinicians from the United States and Saudi Arabia are working to develop gene therapy for treating a rare, hereditary retinal disease. The therapy has been shown to restore lost vision in animal models of retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Their work is being funded in part by a $1.5 million grant from the Prince Salman Center for Disability Research in Saudi Arabia, where the recessive gene mutation that leads to the eye disease RP has been found in children from several families.

RP is a type of hereditary retinal dystrophy, a group of inherited disorders in which abnormalities of the photoreceptor rods and cones lead to progressive visual loss. Rods and cones are specialized light-sensitive nerve cells that line the retina. They collect light and then send nerve signals that the brain interprets as vision. Rods facilitate black and white vision and are used mainly at night. During the day, humans depend on cones for color vision.

In people with the genetic mutations that cause RP, rods and cone cells die. Affected individuals first experience defective dark adaptation or "night blindness," followed by reduction of the peripheral visual field known as tunnel vision, sometimes followed by loss of central vision late in the course of the disease. RP affects one in 3,000 to 4,000 people in the United States.

The planned clinical approach of this research trial involves a receptor protein called MERTK that is expressed in the retinal pigment epithelium, the pigmented cell layer just outside the retina that closely interacts with photoreceptors in the maintenance of visual function. Patients with loss of MERTK function have a defect in phagocytosis �" a mechanism used to remove pathogens and cell debris. As a result of this defect, debris accumulates between the photoreceptors and retinal pigment epithelium, resulting in death of photoreceptors and loss of vision.

The researchers plan to deliver the MERTK gene in a viral vector - a carrier commonly used to deliver genetic material to treat these cells in order to restore function of photoreceptors. Using a rodent model of RP with a similar MERTK mutation, the researchers have demonstrated in proof-of-concept studies that viral vector delivery of MERTK corrects the mutant gene and restores vision.

The eye is an ideal place for gene therapy because it's an "immune-privileged site," meaning that the eye is able to tolerate the introduction of foreign cells with a minimal, if any, inflammatory immune response, according to Zhang.

The research team's next step is to show that such gene therapy is safe in further animal studies, to be conducted in China, along with additional rat studies that will be conducted at UC San Diego and at the University of Florida.

Once safety for the procedure has been shown, the team hopes to proceed to a human clinical trial in seven patients identified in Saudi Arabia, perhaps as early as spring of 2010.

The same type of vector has been successfully tested in both animals and humans for a similar type of early-onset retinal degeneration called Leber's congenital amaurosis.

There is good news for heart attack patients. Australian researchers have formulated a new drug called Dz13 that can prove really beneficial in enhancing a patient’s cardiac [pertaining to the heart.] health after surviving a heart attack.

Heart attack or Myocardial Infarction (MI), as it is medically known, is a life threatening condition. Even if one survives it, the quality of life afterwards suffers a lot. Hence, the new research assumes all the more significance.

Dz13 works by affecting the genes [basic, functional units of heredity, each occupying a specific place on a chromosome.] responsible for inflammation, thereby decreasing the muscle impairment following a heart attack. This in turn puts the patient on the fast track to recovery.

Study findings:
The study was conducted by a team of researchers headed by Levon Khachigian from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

As per researchers, the Dz13 drug keeps a check on the number of cells that die because of angioplasty and stents. Besides, it enhances the pumping action of the heart.

Khachigian was quoted as saying, “While this drug doesn’t prevent the heart attack, it does reduce the damaging effects of the blockage on the heart once it’s happened. It’s a targeted therapy that can be used to complement other procedures and improve chances of a normal recovery.”

Elaborating on Dz13, Ravinay Bhindi, a study co-author from Royal North Shore Hospital said, “This drug not only structurally reduces heart attack size but it protects heart muscle function. Both those things in combination improve outcomes and give hope to patients.”

Heart surgeries can damage heart muscles Khachigian further explained that surgeries performed to resurrect blocked arteries like angioplasty are as much responsible for impairment of heart muscles as the heart attack itself.

“At both these times a range of potentially damaging coordinated molecular responses kick in. We have been able to develop a drug to silence a disease-triggering gene. The drug improves heart function, regardless of whether it’s administered at the time of the heart attack, or at the time of the revascularization process,” remarked Khachigian.

India is home to 60 percent heart patients:
The latest study holds a lot of promise for India in particular, considering the fact that it accounts for 60 percent of the total heart patients in the world.