Sunday 11 March 2012

Bihar News, Latest News from Bihar, News of Bihar, Biharprabha News

Bihar News, Latest News from Bihar, News of Bihar, Biharprabha News

Cholesterol Tests in India not accurate warns Cardiologists

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 07:21 AM PDT

A leading cardiologist here warns that cholesterol tests done in pathological laboratories in India rely on readings that do not help doctors judge a patient’s health accurately.

Vinay Sanghi of the Fortis Escorts Hospital says that the scales used to measure one’s good and bad cholesterol levels in fact tend to hide the reality.

“We feel that the bad cholesterol level or LDL should be less than 70 but most labs tend to feel that up to 100 is okay,” Sanghi told IANS. “The older labs tend to go even higher. Both cases are not acceptable to us.

“Ditto for good cholesterol levels,” he added.

“The problem with these readings is that it leaves a large chunk of population with heart problems undetected,” Sanghi said. “They come to us feeling nothing is wrong with them, but that is not the case.”

Sanghi, who returned to India after serving in the US from 1995 to 2010, says the problem is confined to pathological tests related to cardiology.
“The other lab readings are, I think, okay,” he said. “It is the cholesterol readings that are worrisome.”

But Sanghi says incidents of heart diseases are set to plateau in seven to eight years and then start falling because of greater awareness about a healthy lifestyle and more potent drugs.

According to him, Indians were increasingly cutting down on salt intake, which he said was bound to push down cases of the now rampant incidence of high blood pressure.

Both middle and upper middle class Indians, he said, were also realizing the need for daily exercises. Increasingly friendly medications were immensely useful.

These factors together will push down the number of heart patients in India.

Heart diseases have now become the number one killer in India. A quarter of those who get heart attacks now are in the 25-69 years group.

 

China plans over 100 Satellite launches this year

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 06:18 AM PDT

satelliteChina has set a target of completing a space mission of “100 rockets, 100 satellites” between 2011 and 2015, according to a space official.

According to Zhang Jianheng, deputy general manager of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp (CASC), on an average China will complete about 20 launch missions each year before 2015, Xinhua reported Saturday.

“The densely arranged launch missions and flight tests have posed an unprecedented challenge to the country’s space programme,” said Zhang.

Zhang said China launched 19 satellites, a target orbiter Tiangong-1 and Shenzhou-8 spacecraft with 19 Long March rockets last year, a record high for China’s space programme in launch numbers.

China has surpassed the US, which completed 18 launches in 2011, to become the world’s No.2 in terms of launch numbers following Russia’s 36 launches, he official said, adding in 2012, China has planned 30 satellite launches with 21 rockets.

AIIMS students agitate after Batchmate’s death

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 01:32 AM PST

A day after suspending their relay hunger strike to demand a judicial inquiry into the suicide of an undergraduate student at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) here, the students association Saturday said they will resume the stir if the probe is not ordered.

“As of now we have just suspended our strike. If a judicial inquiry is not ordered into the suicide, we will go on strike again,” Mahendra Meena from the students’ union told IANS.

The students had been agitating after 22-year-old Anil Meena from Rajasthan’s Baran district was found hanging from a ceiling fan in his hostel room. While no suicide note was recovered, police officials said Meena was struggling to cope with the strict study pattern of the institute.

Meena, a farmer’s son, had failed in the first year exam as well as the internal examination. After Meena’s death, undergraduate students raised a furore over the institute’s mentoring mechanism for undergraduate students.

The students are now trying to fix an appointment with Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, also the president of AIIMS.

The students union also alleges that the examination rules were changed after Meena sat for the last exam, due to which his performance deteriorated.

While students claim weightage of internal exams was raised to 50 percent from 25 percent leading to Anil failing in supplementary exams, the institution failed to provide any mechanism for non-English language-knowing students to cope with the heavy syllabus largely taught in English.

“We have documents to prove that some exam assessment rules were changed after Meena sat for the exam. This unprecedented change put him under stress as his performance deteriorated,” the students union member added.

AIIMS director R.C. Deka had once again appointed former University Grants Commission chief Sukhdev Thorat to probe the alleged discrimination against Meena, who was from the reserved category.

A three-member committee, headed by Thorat, was constituted by the central government in 2007 to look into allegations of caste-based discrimination at the premier hospital.

Completing 1 Year of Japan’s Tsunami

Posted: 11 Mar 2012 12:40 AM PST

Kiyoshi Mori drives about one hour everyday from Sendai to inland Takadate Yoshida to grow komatsuna, a green leaf vegetable that is very popular among the Japanese. He rented the land for farming since last April, after his house, car and all farm tools were washed away by last year’s towering tsunami.

“My wife and I now rent a house in Sendai. Life after the disaster was grey. But working together with friends makes me happy and the business of growing and selling these vegetables is not bad,” the 61-year-old farmer said.

Mori used to live in Kitakama, Natori, one of the many small towns dotted along the coast of Japan’s northeast region that was ravaged by the huge quake and tsunami March 11 last year.

Kitakama used to be a major production base of komatsuna, but now, all houses and farm lands are gone, leaving only dead black pine trees, which used to protect residents and lands of Kitakama, lying along the coast of the small town, said Xinhua.

For the most part, the spaces are clear, with only a few damaged cars that look like scars of the tsunami land. Their owners untraceable and no one prepared to sign the order to move them. The reconstruction was slow, but for the survivors, new life has begun elsewhere.

Like Mori, many of the local residents chose to either move to inland Natori or Sendai, the capital of Miyagi ken, to start a new life. Though without a fixed home, life is much harder than before the disaster. The useless salted land back home makes returning impossible.

Mori’s komatsuna was sold to local market at 100 yen (about $1.2) per 250 gm. from last June to December, from which he has already earned 6 million yen.

Mori said: “Returning home now seems impossible, as the soil needs five to six years or more to be able to grow anything, but I’ve always wanted to be back since I was born and grown up here in Natori.”

On the devastated land of Mori’s hometown Kitakama, a few faint tints of green are waving in the sea breeze.

“Rebuilding the damaged coastal forest at Kitakama will take more than 20 years,” said Tadashi Watanabe, director general of OISCA International, a UN related NGO which is now in charge of a Tohoku Coastal Forest Restoration Project, “but only black pine trees can survive the salted land…”

Watanabe pointed to the saplings less than one meter tall and said: “These little black pine trees are four to five years old, not planted. They survived the tsunami themselves, and so will the Natori people.”

We are ready to Tie up with India, says Iran

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 11:58 PM PST

Iran has said that it respects its trade relationship with India and considers it a very fast growing economy. The chief of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Mines Saturday said the Indian economy provides a good opportunity for Iran to cooperate and interact with the country.
On the sidelines of a meeting with a visiting 80-member Indian business delegation, Mohammad Nahavandian told the IRNA news agency that Tehran was ready to start cooperation with New Delhi as India’s economy was now experiencing a 10 percent growth.

India is a country with ample opportunities with which Iran seeks to expand ties, he said.

Nahavandian said the current trade, banking and insurance cooperation between the two countries should be further broadened.

The Indian delegation arrived in Iran Friday for a five-day visit, according to Xinhua.

At a meeting with a group of Iranian businessmen and experts in Tehran Saturday, Arvind Mehta, the joint secretary in India’s ministry of commerce and industry, said the value of India-Iran transactions will hit $25 billion in the next four years.

Mehta put the current level of bilateral transactions at around $15 billion.

Iran sells oil to India worth some $13 billion annually and imports about $2.5 billion worth of goods from India.

Mehta said the visit by the Indian delegation will play an important role in enhancing ties.

Xinhua said that by refusing to join the West-sponsored sanctions against Iran over its controversial nuclear programme, India has found it an opportunity to increase its exports to the country in the absence of Iran’s former economic partners.

Iran has agreed to receive over 40 percent of its revenue from its oil exports to India in rupees.

The UN Security Council and Western countries have imposed a series of economic sanctions on Iran over the nuclear programme.

Most of Iranian financial institutions have been barred from directly accessing the US and the European Union financial systems.

The US has been rallying its allies in imposing similar sanction pressures on Iran’s financial system over the nuclear programme, which Tehran describes as solely for “peaceful” use of nuclear energy. The US and its Western allies suspect it as an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.

Now Sri Lanka attacks Indian Fishermen

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 11:30 PM PST

After Italy, now its neighbour Sri Lanka which is attacking India’s integrity. Sixteen fishermen from Rameshwaram were injured in a mid-sea attack allegedly by Sri Lankan Naval personnel while fishing near the international maritime boundary line ( IMBL) in the Palk Strait, police said.

The Lankan Naval personnel allegedly attacked the fishermen with wooden logs, stones, bottles resulting in fracture to a 25-year old fisherman and bruises and bleeding injuries to others last night, police said.

Mathiazhagan, who suffered the fracture, has been admitted to the government hospital here while several other fishermen, whose back were swollen with weals and bruises, were treated at private hospitals, they said.

Mathiazhagan said it was a “brutal” attack by the Lankan navalmen who surrounded 25 boats of the fishermen. “They damaged the boats, snapped the fishing nets and lashed us with logs and pelted stones,” he said.

A fisheries department official described the attack as a violation of human rights.

Local fishermen association leaders Sesu and Devaraj alleged the Sri Lankans, who had come in a Naval ship, intimidated and frightened the fishermen.

The two slammed the Centre for remaining ‘mute spectator’ to the recurring attacks on fishermen of Tamil Nadu.

Referring to the prompt action taken in recent incidents of killing of two fishermen off Kerala coast by Marines onboard Italian oil tanker and hit-and-run case allegedly involving a Singapore flagged ship, they sought to know “Why the Government is silent even after 300 fishermen had been killed by the Lankan Naval men (over the recent years).”

They also demanded that the government take steps to recover the fish catch seized by Sri Lankan navalmen and also file a case for attacking “innocent” fishermen.

Snow Leopard spotted in Kargil for first time

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 11:07 PM PST

snow leopardSome days ago, on a wind-swept, desolate mountainside in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kargil district, infra-red cameras captured a shape moving about in the cold winter night. To the naked, untrained eye, it might have appeared to be a ghostly apparition. But for environmentalists, it was a cause for celebration.

For that shape was none other than a snow leopard – the mysterious, secretive and most endangered cat of Asia.

“We had set up four camera traps just a few kilometres away from the Line of Control (LoC) in October 2010. They have now yielded more than 500 snaps. This is the first time that snow leopards have been shot by camera traps. In 2009, I had shot one with a hand-held camera,” researcher Aishwarya Maheshwari who led the WWF team that set the traps told IANS.

Maheshwari’s achievement received an enthusiastic response from India’s environmental community. “It shows that wildlife can survive in conflict zones too,” feels Maheshwari.

The snow leopard (Panthera Uncia) is mainly found in mountainous central and south Asia, in mountain ranges like the Altai, Pamirs, Tian Shan, Kunlun, Hindu Kush, Karakoram and the Himalayas.

Koustubh Sharma, senior regional ecologist at the India chapter of the US-based Snow Leopard Conservation Trust, says, “Snow leopards are found across 12 countries and an area of two million sq km. As few as 3,500 or 7,000 individuals are believed to be left in the wild. In India, a ball park estimate is that of about 700-1,000 individuals.”

Given that the snow leopard’s range covers some of the highest mountains of the world, research on the animal has always been difficult, if not impossible. Says Maheshwari, “It is very difficult to sight a snow leopard. For one, their range covers several international borders and conflict zones. Secondly, they are mostly found in mountainous areas, above the tree line, usually starting at 3,000 metres. In such regions, biologists can only work during short summers and not winters when temperatures dip. A lack of logistic support thus hinders research,” Maheshwari told IANS.

But research is what is needed most today as poaching, habitat and prey base loss and retaliatory killings by humans contrive to deplete snow leopard populations.

“The major threat to the animal is from loss of natural prey due to high human usage of alpine pastures by livestock. This brings the snow leopard into conflict with local human interests since they are forced to prey on livestock. Often, they are poisoned or killed due to this conflict. Also there is a huge price for the pelt of the snow leopard in the international market,” says Dr. Y.V. Jhala, one of India’s foremost big cat experts.

Sharma also feels that approaches to snow leopard conservation need to vary from region to region. “It highlights the fact that landscape/site specific conservation models need to be used for saving snow leopards,” he says.

In 2009, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests launched the ambitious “Project Snow Leopard” for conserving the population of the snow leopard in five Indian Himalayan states – Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh. The results have so far been mixed.

“Nothing much has happened on the ground,” says Qamar Qureshi, senior scientist and researcher at the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII).

However, Sharma strikes an optimistic note: “Project Snow Leopard aims at holistic conservation of the species while using efficient monitoring protocols.”

Across Asia too, scientists are hopeful that the greatest difficulty facing the snow leopard might in fact become a boon for its conservation. The animal’s range straddles some of the most strife-torn conflict zones in the world – Xinjiang, Tibet, Afghanistan, Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh. But political turmoil might turn out to be a saviour.

“International boundaries are the best hopes for the survival of wildlife. Most animals thrive when human use of the land is low or absent – this being the case on disputed borders. The Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea is a boon for wildlife,” says Jhala.

Dr. Bilal Habib, research scientist at the WII, told IANS: “Political instability may have hindered in knowing exact numbers or other research aspects. But from a conservation perspective, the turmoil has actually helped wildlife to recover in such areas.”

In the end, feels Sharma, the conservation of the snow leopard is of absolute importance. “Snow leopards are the thermometers of the mountain ecosystem. They are also one of the most charismatic cats adapted to living in these high altitudes. It is important that we save this species.”

Sachin dismisses any retirement plans in 2012

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 10:43 PM PST

Sachin Tendulkar  had dismissed any speculations arising out of his retirement after finishing 100 x 100. Zee News reported that Tendulkar, in an SMS sent to the channel, has rubbished all speculations about his retirements.
Speculation was rife that Tendulkar would hang up his boots after getting the century in the Asia Cup.

Another veteran batsman Rahul Dravid announced his retirement from international cricket Friday after his poor show in Australia.

Former Indian captain Kapil Dev had said that Tendulkar should have retired after India’s World Cup triumph last year.

Where Maoists and Government work together

Posted: 10 Mar 2012 09:42 PM PST

Maoists are not always revolting against Government. In Jharkhand they are helping Govt, when it comes to drinking water facilities.

“There are no problems from the Maoists, as everyone needs water…in fact, they help us,” a state government official told IANS on condition of anonymity.

Large parts of the backward but mineral-rich state are under Maoist rebel influence, with as many as 20 of the 24 districts considered to be under the sway of left-wing extremism.

The official said lower-level Maoist functionaries interact with the government staff on a daily basis when it comes to repairing old handpumps and borewells or setting up new ones to provide drinking water to tribal populations.

As the water stress months – March to June – have set in, the demand for drinking water works would go up in the rural areas.

“Some of their (Maoists’) demands are genuine,” said an official involved with the survey and setting up of borewell projects in the rebel dominated areas.

Though waterfalls in the hilly parts of the state have been conventional sources of drinking water, bacterial contamination in recent years has rendered the water bodies unfit for human consumption, say officials.

Though plans to increase piped water supply, which remains low at seven percent in the state, may take some more years, officials said borewells and handpumps are the only viable means to provide drinking water in rural areas.

As a result, Jharkhand has the highest density of handpumps in the country with 61 persons per unit.

In Jharkhand, large swathes of the population do not have access to safe drinking water and sanitation. About 30 percent of habitations have partial drinking water facilities and groundwater sources contain fluoride, arsenic and iron.

Officials claim that the problem of arsenic is now confined to three blocks Udhwa, Rajmahal and Sahebganj in the northeastern parts of the state and that they will finish treating in the next 18 months under a special scheme.

Laying stress on drinking water supply, the state aims to increase spending on it from three percent to 10 percent during the 12th Five Year Plan from 2012-13 to 2016-17.
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