PAHO Director meets the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez

Cristina Mitchell

8 Feb 2023

Per the notice, every candidate should pay the fee and report to the help centre only after taking the latest copy of the allotment letter. Reporting and depositing original certificates and confirmation of admission at the authorized help centre (10:00 am to 4:00 pm) can be done from 8.2.2023 from 10:00 am to 10.2.2023 up to 4:00 pm.

To view the results, click on the link below –

https://medicaldialogues.in/pdf_upload/allotment-201045.pdf

The list of candidates who requires reporting and the final rank list has also been released. The detailed lists are enclosed in the notice below.

There are  75 branches of Axis Bank across Gujarat for the payment of tuition fees. The braches in the following places – Ahmadabad, Amreli, Anand, Arvalli, Banaskantha, Bharuch, Bhavnagar, Botad, Dahod, Devbhumi Dwarka, Gandhinagar, Gir Somnath, Jamnagar, Junagadh, Kheda, Kutch, Mahisagar, Mehsana, Morbi, Navsar, Panchmahal, Patan, Porbandar, Rajkot, Rajpipla, Sabarkantha, Surat, Surendranagar, Tapi, Vadodara, Valsad. The detailed list is enclosed in the notice below.

Also Read:BFUHS Announces Walk-in Counseling Schedule For BSc Nursing

47 help centres have been allotted for the BSc Nursing courses for admission across Gujarat. These help centres are in the following districts – Ahmedabad, Amreli, Anand, Arvalli, Banaskantha, Bhavnagar, Chhotaudepur, Dahod, Dang, Gandhinagar, Gir Somnath, Jamnagar, Junagadh, Kachchh, Kheda, Mahisagar, Mehsana, Narmada, Navsari, Panchmahal, Patan, Porbandar, Rajkot, Sabarkantha, Surat, Surendranagar, Tapi, Vadodara, Valsad. The detailed list is enclosed in the notice below.

Candidates who have taken admission to courses other than BSc Nursing, i.e. Physiotherapy, GNM, ANM, Orthotics and Prosthetics, Occupational Therapy, B.Optometry and Audiology in any Government or Independent Institutions have given consent were not allowed to participate.

BSc Nursing is a 4 years professional undergraduate course. Those who have passed class 12 from Gujarat Board or its equivalent in science stream with Biology, Chemistry, Physics and English with minimum eligible marks are eligible for BSc Nursing admission. The candidates must be of 17 years of age by 31st December 2022.

The medical education department plays a pivotal role in developing medical and paramedical personnel to cater to the state's health needs. The department also has a role to play in establishing and maintaining well-equipped teaching institutions, which are the premier referral centres from peripheral hospitals.

To view the notices, click on the links below -

https://medicaldialogues.in/pdf_upload/axis-bank-202223-1-201046.pdf

https://medicaldialogues.in/pdf_upload/hp-202223-201047.pdf

https://medicaldialogues.in/pdf_upload/paraclosurer4-201048.pdf

https://medicaldialogues.in/pdf_upload/requiredreportingr4-1-201049.pdf

Also Read:NEET MDS Registration window To Reopen

Today’s technology not only makes life easier for everyone, but in the case of people with vision loss, it allows them to do even the simplest of things others might not have to think about. With modern technology, people with vision loss can do...

Los murciélagos en todo el mundo son vectores primarios para la transmisión de virus de animales a humanos. Generalmente esos virus son inofensivos para los murciélagos, pero pueden ser mortales para los humanos.

Por ejemplo, en China, los murciélagos de herradura se citan como una causa probable del brote de covid-19. Y los investigadores creen que la presión ejercida sobre los murciélagos por el cambio climático y la invasión del desarrollo humano han aumentado la frecuencia con la que los virus saltan de estos animales a las personas, causando lo que se conoce como enfermedades zoonóticas.

“Estos eventos indirectos son el resultado de una cascada de factores estresantes: el hábitat de los murciélagos cambia, el clima se vuelve más extremo, los murciélagos se trasladan a áreas humanas para encontrar comida”, dijo Raina Plowright, ecologista de enfermedades y coautora de un artículo reciente en la revista Nature y otro en Ecology Letters sobre el papel de los cambios ecológicos en las enfermedades.

Es por eso que Agnieszka Rynda-Apple, inmunóloga de la Universidad Estatal de Montana (MSU), planea traer murciélagos frugívoros (o de la fruta) de Jamaica a Bozeman este invierno para iniciar una colonia de reproducción y acelerar el trabajo de su laboratorio como parte de un equipo de 70 investigadores en siete países.

El grupo, llamado BatOneHealth, fundado por Plowright, espera encontrar formas de predecir dónde el póximo virus mortal podría dar el salto de los murciélagos a las personas. “Estamos colaborando para responder a la pregunta de por qué los murciélagos son un vector tan fantástico”, dijo Rynda-Apple.

“Estamos tratando de entender qué es lo que hace que sus sistemas inmunológicos retengan el virus y cuál es la situación en la que lo eliminan”, agregó.

Para estudiar el papel del estrés nutricional, explicó que los investigadores crean diferentes dietas para estos mamíferos, “los infectan con el virus de la influenza y luego estudian cuánto virus están eliminando, la duración de la eliminación viral y su respuesta antiviral”.

Si bien Rynda Apple y sus colegas ya han estado haciendo este tipo de experimentos, la cría de murciélagos les permitirá ampliar la investigación. Es un esfuerzo arduo comprender a fondo cómo el cambio ambiental contribuye al estrés nutricional, y predecir mejor el efecto indirecto.

“Si realmente podemos entender todas las piezas del rompecabezas, eso nos dará herramientas para volver atrás y pensar en medidas contra-ecológicas que podemos poner en práctica para romper el ciclo de los efectos indirectos”, dijo Andrew Hoegh, profesor asistente de estadísticas en MSU que está creando modelos para posibles escenarios indirectos.

El pequeño equipo de investigadores de la MSU trabaja con un investigador del Rocky Mountain Laboratories de los Institutos Nacionales de Salud en Hamilton, Montana.

Los artículos recientes publicados en Nature y Ecology Letters se centran en el virus Hendra en Australia, que es donde nació Plowright.

Hendra es un virus respiratorio que causa síntomas similares a los de la gripe y se propaga de los murciélagos a los caballos, y luego puede transmitirse a las personas que tratan a los caballos. Es mortal, con una tasa de mortalidad del 75% en caballos. De las siete personas que hasta el momento se sabe que contrajeron esta infección, cuatro murieron.

La pregunta que impulsó el trabajo de Plowright es por qué Hendra comenzó a aparecer en caballos y personas en la década de 1990, a pesar de que los murciélagos probablemente han albergado al virus por millones de años.

La investigación demuestra que la razón es el cambio ambiental. Plowright comenzó su investigación sobre murciélagos en 2006. En muestras tomadas de murciélagos australianos llamados zorros voladores, ella y sus colegas rara vez detectaron el virus.

Después de que el ciclón tropical Larry frente a la costa del Territorio del Norte australiano acabara con la fuente de alimento de los murciélagos en 2005-06, cientos de miles de animales simplemente desaparecieron. Sin embargo, encontraron una pequeña población de murciélagos débiles y hambrientos cargados con el virus Hendra.

Eso llevó a Plowright a centrarse en el estrés nutricional como un factor clave en el efecto indirecto. El equipo analizó 25 años de datos sobre la pérdida de hábitat, el derrame y el clima, y descubrieron un vínculo entre la pérdida de fuentes de alimento causada por el cambio ambiental y las altas cargas virales en murciélagos estresados por la comida.

En el año posterior a un patrón climático de El Niño, con sus altas temperaturas, que ocurren cada pocos años, muchos árboles de eucalipto no producen las flores con el néctar que necesitan los murciélagos. Y la invasión humana de otros hábitats, desde las granjas hasta el desarrollo urbano, ha eliminado las fuentes alternativas de alimentos. Entonces, los murciélagos tienden a mudarse a áreas urbanas con higueras, mangos y otros árboles deficientes y, estresados, propagan los virus.

Cuando los murciélagos excretan orina y heces, los caballos las inhalan mientras huelen el suelo. Los investigadores esperan que su trabajo con murciélagos infectados con Hendra ilustre un principio universal: cómo la destrucción y la alteración de la naturaleza pueden aumentar la probabilidad de que los patógenos mortales pasen de los animales salvajes a los humanos.

Las tres fuentes más probables de contagio son los murciélagos, los mamíferos y los artrópodos, especialmente las garrapatas. Alrededor del 60% de las enfermedades infecciosas emergentes que infectan a los humanos provienen de animales, y alrededor de dos tercios de ellas provienen de animales salvajes.

La idea de que la deforestación y la invasión humana de las tierras salvajes alimentan las pandemias no es nueva. Por ejemplo, expertos creen que el VIH, que causa el SIDA, infectó a los humanos por primera vez cuando la gente comía chimpancés en África central. Un brote en Malasia a fines de 1998 y principios de 1999 del virus Nipah transmitido por murciélagos se propagó de murciélagos a cerdos. Los cerdos lo amplificaron y se propagó a los humanos, con un brote que infectó a 276 personas, y mató a 106.

Ahora está emergiendo la conexión con el estrés provocado por los cambios ambientales.

Una pieza crítica de este complejo rompecabezas es el sistema inmunológico de los murciélagos. Los murciélagos frugívoros de Jamaica que vivirán en la MSU ayudarán a los investigadores a obtener más información sobre los efectos del estrés nutricional en su carga viral.

Vincent Munster, jefe de la unidad de ecología de virus de Rocky Mountain Laboratories y miembro de BatOneHealth, también está analizando diferentes especies de murciélagos para comprender mejor la ecología del contagio. “Hay 1,400 especies diferentes de murciélagos y hay diferencias muy significativas entre los que albergan coronavirus y los murciélagos que albergan el virus del Ébola”, dijo Munster. “Y murciélagos que viven cientos de miles juntos versus murciélagos que son relativamente solitarios”.

Mientras tanto, Gary Tabor, esposo de Plowright, es presidente del Center for Large Landscape Conservation, una organización sin fines de lucro que aplica la ecología de la investigación de enfermedades para proteger el hábitat de la vida silvestre, en parte, para garantizar que la vida silvestre esté adecuadamente alimentada y protegerse contra la propagación de virus.

“La fragmentación del hábitat es un problema de salud planetaria que no se está abordando lo suficiente, dado que el mundo continúa experimentando niveles sin precedentes de deforestación”, dijo Tabor.

A medida que mejore la capacidad de predecir brotes, otras estrategias se vuelven posibles. Los modelos que pueden predecir dónde podría extenderse el virus Hendra podrían conducir a la vacunación de los caballos en esas áreas. Otra posible solución es el conjunto de “contramedidas ecológicas” a las que se refirió Hoegh, como la plantación a gran escala de eucaliptos en flor para que los murciélagos zorros voladores no se vean obligados a buscar néctar en áreas desarrolladas.

“En este momento, el mundo está enfocado en cómo podemos detener la próxima pandemia”, dijo Plowright. “Desafortunadamente, preservar o restaurar la naturaleza rara vez es parte de la discusión”.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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The Walkers Institute for Regenerative Research Education and Design (WIRRED) hosted the launch of A Garden of Hope at Walkers Reserve on Saturday, January 28. This work is a creative intervention at the Reserve by Annalee Davis in collaboration with Kevin Talma and the Walkers Institute for Regenerative Research Education and Design (WIRRED). 

The name, A Garden of Hope, refers to the 17th-century Hope estate, later amalgamated into a larger Scotland plantation, once owned by Judith Powrey, becoming the foundation of what is now Walkers Reserve. It eventually shifted from sugar cane to a silica sand quarry. 

In recent years, under WIRRED’s stewardship, it has been transitioning to a site of permaculture and regeneration. That is where hope returns, through vision, knowledge, and action; an exhausted landscape is being transformed into a healthier ecosystem and a post-plantation site of healing. It is the largest regeneration project in the Caribbean region. WIRRED continues to engage with myriad partners to meet the goals of environmental conservation to increase biodiversity, develop natural habitats and build awareness around reducing the negative effects of climate change. 

In her narrative about the project, Davis says: “This plot highlights the revolutionary and subversive history of plants, acknowledging them as agents of restoration and reparation while insisting on the need for us to remember valuable systems of knowledge that are being erased or forgotten. This living apothecary is intended as a sacred space of healing, regeneration, and contemplation, honouring the traditions of bush medicine and recognising this site as hallowed ground. The plants in the garden have been designed with a focus on well-being for women’s reproductive and post-reproductive health and are also available as a natural first aid kit. 

“I hope that visitors who spend time in the Garden of Hope might reflect on the ancestors who came before us, using what was available to them for medicine – plants growing in their environment that they had to learn about to heal themselves and one another. There is also a QR code and some labelling offering information about local plant uses and traditions. This is very much a work in progress, and hopefully, there will be more opportunities to engage with the garden through workshops for those who are interested.” 

The Garden of Hope is one of the first installations under the eARTh programme at Walkers Reserve. There is no earth without ART and as WIRRED continues to steward the regeneration of the Reserve from a sand quarry into a thriving space for connection and reconnection, they hold space for artistic expression and cultural transformation.

WIRRED is thankful to all contributors to the project and acknowledges everyone who has been a part of its evolution including the McNeel family, Island Developments Ltd., the team at Walkers Reserve, Richard White for the construction and maintenance of the cobb beds, and Ireka Jelani Spiritual Baptist elder who blessed the Garden at Saturday’s launch supported by her two children, Subira and Baruti. (PR)

The post A Garden of Hope launched at Walkers Reserve appeared first on Barbados Today.

More than four dozen Jamaican fruit bats destined for a lab in Bozeman, Montana, are set to become part of an experiment with an ambitious goal: predicting the next global pandemic.

Bats worldwide are primary vectors for virus transmission from animals to humans. Those viruses often are harmless to bats but can be deadly to humans. Horseshoe bats in China, for example, are cited as a likely cause of the covid-19 outbreak. And researchers believe pressure put on bats by climate change and encroachment from human development have increased the frequency of viruses jumping from bats to people, causing what are known as zoonotic diseases.

“Spillover events are the result of a cascade of stressors — bat habitat is cleared, climate becomes more extreme, bats move into human areas to find food,” said Raina Plowright, a disease ecologist and co-author of a recent paper in the journal Nature and another in Ecology Letters on the role of ecological changes in disease.

That’s why Montana State University immunologist Agnieszka Rynda-Apple plans to bring the Jamaican fruit bats to Bozeman this winter to start a breeding colony and accelerate her lab’s work as part of a team of 70 researchers in seven countries. The group, called BatOneHealth — founded by Plowright — hopes to find ways to predict where the next deadly virus might make the leap from bats to people.

“We’re collaborating on the question of why bats are such a fantastic vector,” said Rynda-Apple. “We’re trying to understand what is it about their immune systems that makes them retain the virus, and what is the situation in which they shed the virus.”

To study the role of nutritional stress, researchers create different diets for them, she said, “and infect them with the influenza virus and then study how much virus they are shedding, the length of the viral shedding, and their antiviral response.”

While she and her colleagues have already been doing these kinds of experiments, breeding bats will allow them to expand the research.

It’s a painstaking effort to thoroughly understand how environmental change contributes to nutritional stress and to better predict spillover. “If we can really understand all the pieces of the puzzle, that gives us tools to go back in and think about eco-counter measures that we can put in place that will break the cycle of spillovers,” said Andrew Hoegh, an assistant professor of statistics at MSU who is creating models for possible spillover scenarios.

The small team of researchers at MSU works with a researcher at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana.

The recent papers published in Nature and Ecology Letters focus on the Hendra virus in Australia, which is where Plowright was born. Hendra is a respiratory virus that causes flu-like symptoms and spreads from bats to horses, and then can be passed on to people who treat the horses. It is deadly, with a mortality rate of 75% in horses. Of the seven people known to have been infected, four died.

The question that propelled Plowright’s work is why Hendra began to show up in horses and people in the 1990s, even though bats have likely hosted the virus for eons. The research demonstrates that the reason is environmental change.

Plowright began her bat research in 2006. In samples taken from Australian bats called flying foxes, she and her colleagues rarely detected the virus. After Tropical Cyclone Larry off the coast of the Northern Territory wiped out the bats’ food source in 2005-06, hundreds of thousands of the animals simply disappeared. However, they found one small population of weak and starving bats loaded with the Hendra virus. That led Plowright to focus on nutritional stress as a key player in spillover.

She and her collaborators scoured 25 years of data on habitat loss, spillover, and climate and discovered a link between the loss of food sources caused by environmental change and high viral loads in food-stressed bats.

In the year after an El Niño climate pattern, with its high temperatures — occurring every few years — many eucalyptus trees don’t produce the flowers with nectar the bats need. And human encroachment on other habitats, from farms to urban development, has eliminated alternative food sources. And so the bats tend to move into urban areas with substandard fig, mango, and other trees, and, stressed, shed virus. When the bats excrete urine and feces, horses inhale it while sniffing the ground.

The researchers hope their work with Hendra-infected bats will illustrate a universal principle: how the destruction and alteration of nature can increase the likelihood that deadly pathogens will spill over from wild animals to humans.

The three most likely sources of spillover are bats, mammals, and arthropods, especially ticks. Some 60% of emerging infectious diseases that infect humans come from animals, and about two-thirds of those come from wild animals.

The idea that deforestation and human encroachment into wild land fuels pandemics is not new. For example, experts believe that HIV, which causes AIDS, first infected humans when people ate chimpanzees in central Africa. A Malaysian outbreak in late 1998 and early 1999 of the bat-borne Nipah virus spread from bats to pigs. The pigs amplified it, and it spread to humans, infecting 276 people and killing 106 in that outbreak. Now emerging is the connection to stress brought on by environmental changes.

One critical piece of this complex puzzle is bat immune systems. The Jamaican fruit bats kept at MSU will help researchers learn more about the effects of nutritional stress on their viral load.

Vincent Munster, chief of the virus ecology unit of Rocky Mountain Laboratories and a member of BatOneHealth, is also looking at different species of bats to better understand the ecology of spillover. “There are 1,400 different bat species and there are very significant differences between bats who harbor coronaviruses and bats who harbor Ebola virus,” said Munster. “And bats who live with hundreds of thousands together versus bats who are relatively solitary.”

Meanwhile, Plowright’s husband, Gary Tabor, is president of the Center for Large Landscape Conservation, a nonprofit that applies ecology of disease research to protect wildlife habitat — in part, to assure that wildlife is adequately nourished and to guard against virus spillover.

“Habitat fragmentation is a planetary health issue that is not being sufficiently addressed, given the world continues to experience unprecedented levels of land clearing,” said Tabor.

As the ability to predict outbreaks improves, other strategies become possible. Models that can predict where the Hendra virus could spill over could lead to vaccination for horses in those areas.

Another possible solution is the set of “eco-counter measures” Hoegh referred to — such as large-scale planting of flowering eucalyptus trees so flying foxes won’t be forced to seek nectar in developed areas.

“Right now, the world is focused on how we can stop the next pandemic,” said Plowright. “Unfortunately, preserving or restoring nature is rarely part of the discussion.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

Dr. Jarbas Barbosa elected as WHO Regional Director for the Americas

Cristina Mitchell

6 Feb 2023

Rodriguez Baisi, MD, of Ponce Health Sciences University in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and colleagues wrote.The population-based retrospective cohort study included 643 children and adolescents aged 7 to 12 years who had an initial acne diagnosis between 2010 and 2018.For each case, the group