Daily Hindu Editorials

A large, nationally representative study of diabetes in India has found that more than 10% of Indians living in urban areas are affected with the disorder. However, the more worrisome fact is that half the population living with diabetes has absolutely no knowledge of it. This is intriguing when we consider the several innovations in health care taking place around the world. At present, American biopharmaceutical researchers are developing over 170 types of medication for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and related disorders such as diabetic neuropathy and chronic kidney disease. Therefore, there is a relentless global drive to invent fresh, life-saving and life-improving treatments to counter diabetes, apart from paying close attention to the attendant costs. These advancements are not only changing the way researchers and doctors are approaching diabetes treatment but are also having an enormous potential impact to helping people live longer and healthier lives. However, our government...

Century-old debate on its relationship with other owlets resolved Between four and six million years ago, long before humans evolved, drastic climatic changes in the Indian subcontinent led to the evolution of a new bird: central India’s now-endangered and rare forest owlet. Scientists have also found that it belongs to the same genus as the commonly-seen spotted owlet, finally settling a century-old debate on its genetic relationship with other Indian owlets. The taxonomy of the forest owlet (Heteroglaux blewetti), which resembles the spotted owlet Athene brama, has always been a mystery. Taxonomists placed it in a separate genus Heteroglaux and sometimes in Athene; others saw it as more closely related to another species, the jungle owlet. For the first time, a team of scientists obtained permits to carefully take some feathers from forest, spotted and jungle owlets in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh. From the feathers, they extracted DNA (...

Human beings are being made redundant by something they created. This is not a humanoid, robot, or computer but money as capital We have all read stories, or seen films, about robots taking over. How, some time in the future, human beings will be marginalised, effectively replaced by machines, real or virtual. Common to these stories is the trope of the world taken over by something constructed of inert material, something mechanical and ‘heartless’. Also common to these stories is the idea that this will happen in the future. What if I tell you that it has already happened? The future is here! The culprit that humans created In fact, the future has been building up for some decades. Roughly from the 1970s onwards, human beings have been increasingly made redundant by something they created, and that was once of use to them. Except that this ‘something’ is not a humanoid, robot, or even a computer; it is money. Or, more precisely, it is money as capital. It ...

Hospitals have devised ways and mechanisms to escalate the overall cost of a cardiac-surgery package Early in February, 58-year-old Mumbai resident Ajmatunissa Khan discovered that two major regions in her heart, the left anterior descending artery and the left circumflex artery, were blocked (over 70%). Ms. Khan was advised an angioplasty procedure that would involve implanting two drug-eluting stents to open up the arteries. Stent prices had already been capped last year, but by the time the homemaker reached out to her relatives and friends to collect money for the procedures, the key regulator, the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), announced a further reduction in stent prices this month. The ceiling price for drug-eluting stents has been reduced to Rs. 27,890 from the earlier Rs. 29,600, which means that Ms. Khan would have to pay Rs. 3,420 less for two stents. “I don’t have health insurance. I had to borrow all the money from people. For patients lik...

It helped heal scratch wounds in 24 hours By embedding silver oxide nanoparticles on silk fibre, scientists have produced a new material that can be used to make patches to help in healing of wounds and in preventing infection. The patch was able to heal scratch wounds completely in 24 hours and also kill pathogens like S. aureus and M.tuberculosis . The researchers first tested the mechanical properties of the silk patch. “An ideal wound-dressing material should have good thermal insulation and also allow gaseous and fluid exchange in the wound area. The new material was able to maintain the moisture and had ideal water-holding capacity,” says Dr Punuri Jayasekhar Babu, post-doctoral researcher, IIT Madras, and the first author of the paper published in Colloid and Interface Science. “We also performed experiments to find the swelling and degradation properties of the silk patch, which are important for wound healing materials. The patch was hydrophilic in nature a...