Monday 19 November 2012

[www.keralites.net] All about Tuberculosis

 

What Is Tuberculosis?
Pulmonary tuberculosis, commonly known as TB, is a contagious infection caused by the bacteria known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The disease gets transferred when a person inhales air droplets infected by the sneeze, cough or breath of an already infected person. Poor nutrition, and crowded and unsanitary living conditions, both of which are risk factors for the disease, make a large portion of Indians susceptible to TB. These are the main reasons why tuberculosis is so widespread in India. 
What Are The Signs And Symptoms Of Tuberculosis?
Not all people infected with TB show symptoms and the bacteria remains latent in the body for quite a long period or even forever. Only a certain percentage of people infected with TB get the active disease. However, since latent TB can become active at any stage of life, it is important to treat everyone infected with TB, even if they show no signs of an active infection. 
While latent TB shows no symptoms and can be diagnosed only through certain tests, the symptoms of active tuberculosis include:
  • Cough with mucous, often yellowish or greenish, or blood tinged
  • Feeling of lethargy and illness
  • Shortness of breath
  • Low grade fever
  • Fatigue
  • Chest, back and/or kidney pain
  • Unintentional loss of weight 
When Should You Contact Your Doctor?
You should contact your doctor if you have been exposed to the infection through someone who has active TB, so that you may undergo tests, and if required, treatment for tuberculosis. If you experience any of the signs or symptoms of TB, then contact your healthcare provider for immediate treatment. Since the symptoms of TB are similar to those of many other diseases like bronchitis and pneumonia, it is important to get the proper tests done before treatment for tuberculosis starts. 
How Can One Prevent Tuberculosis?
The tuberculosis vaccine or BCG is administered in infancy to prevent the occurrence of TB. However, for those who have not been vaccinated, and because the vaccine is not totally fool proof, the best ways of preventing TB are:
  • Avoid being in close quarters with someone who has active TB, unless that person has been treated for the disease for a period of at least two weeks.
  • If someone in the family has TB, then he or she should be encouraged to get treated.
  • Get tested for infection if you suspect you have been exposed to the bacteria. Remember that active TB can be prevented even in people who have been infected by the bacteria but have yet to develop the disease.
  • Use face masks if you visit or work in a facility where active TB patients are treated. 
Remember, TB is a notifiable disease in India!
Since May 2012, TB has been declared a notifiable disease in India. This means that anyone treating a TB patient needs to notify the government of India, and this includes health care facilities operating both under the government as well as the private sector. All tuberculosis cases being dealt with have to be reported to the municipal health officer or the chief medical officer of a municipality or district on a monthly basis. 
This serious step has been taken in order to have better control over the disease, its transmission as well as its treatment. Another important factor due to which tuberculosis has been made a notifiable disease is the widespread emergence of drug resistant TB, also known as Multi Drug Resistant TB or MDR TB. 
The government believes that the free advanced testing and high quality medication needed for the eradication of tuberculosis can be provided only under the Revised National TB Control Programme or the RNTCP. However, what needs to be kept in mind is that the cooperation of tuberculosis patients and their families is also of utmost importance for controlling and treating this deadly disease. 
Note: Please consult your Doctor for more details and guidance.  This is just for the general awareness  and my honest and  humble  effort to educate my readers the imoprtance of keeping a healhty life and also to undersatand matters realted to the basic medical terms and common diseases.   The contents of this mail is compiled from  various soruces.  Errors and omissions are expected.
Best Regards
Prakash Nair

www.keralites.net

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[www.keralites.net] The race to make indigenous chips gathers pace

 

The race to make indigenous chips gathers pace

Cosmic Circuits Co-founder & CEO Ganapathy Subramaniam

RBR Layout is a world apart from glitzy Whitefield or Electronic City where most of Bangalore's globally-renowned technology companies have their offices. Yet it is in this smelly, rundown neighbourhood that Saankhya Labs, one of just a handful of Indian companies that makes chips - the vital brain inside every electronic device - used to be located. The company's interior was as unimpressive as its surroundings - a drab double-storey building with no air conditioning, paint peeling off the walls, desks reminiscent of a government office. Strapped for funds, Saankhya Labs could not afford anything better. Two years ago, a prospective Singaporean client who visited the office was so shocked he could not take his eyes off the ugly-looking walls.

"Don't look at the walls, look at our technology," Parag Naik, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Saankhya Labs, remembers telling him. And indeed, the PowerPoint presentation Naik made transformed the visitor's initial impression. Saankhya was then making a state-of-theart chip with 15 functionalities, whose uniqueness the presentation described step by step - the same chip could be used in televisions, set top boxes, personal computers and even mobile phones. Called a communication receiver, it could support multiple communication standards.
Though India has acquired a global reputation for information technology services and semiconductor design work, its contribution to hardware so far has been nothing to crow about. But that is changing with companies like Saankhya Labs, Cosmic Circuits, Ineda Systems, Aura Semiconductor, Signalchip and a few others leading the way. They are all making high-quality chips using what is called the 'fabless model' - they design and develop chips, and later market them, but outsource the actual fabrication to companies in Taiwan, China and Singapore, the world's premier hardware manufacturing hubs. It is a model followed by numerous other companies across the globe, including the United States, since setting up 'fab' units is extremely expensive. Intel's new plant in Arizona, called Fab 42, for instance, cost $5 billion (Rs 26,000 crore). One of the most successful fabless chip manufacturers, whose example inspired a number of the nascent Indian efforts, hails from Taiwan - MediaTek, which makes chips for wireless communication and digital multimedia.

Of the indigenous chipmakers, Cosmic Circuits is by far the most successful. Cofounded by current CEO Ganapathy Subramaniam and three others, it sells around two to three million chips a month, which are used either in touch sensors or in the power management processors employed by devices like tablets and smartphones.

Subramaniam spent 15 years at Texas Instruments, one of the world's biggest chipmakers, before starting his own company. "Most of our customers are in China," says Subramaniam, sitting in his laboratory, located near Whitefield. He has spent a million dollars on the lab, which he has fully equipped to conduct quality checks on the chips. One of the tests even involves putting them in a 'burning chamber' at a temperature as high as 150 degrees Centigrade to test their reliability. He notes that he has sold around 20 million units since his company began making chips in 2009, competing successfully against reputed, multinational chipmakers such as Maxim and Linear Technology.

Aura Semiconductor, two years old, again based in Bangalore, makes chips for TVs and mobile phones. Signalchip makes chips for use in communications. Hyderabad-based Ineda Systems is building a new kind of chip that will make tablets and smartphones much more energy- efficient. "Customers are open to entertaining Indian firms if they see a good team with experience, and as long as they understand what makes us different," says Balaji Kanigicherla, founder and CEO of Ineda Systems.

Why did India take so long to get into products? It has been providing semiconductor design services for over two decades now - Texas Instruments has had a Bangalore-based Indian subsidiary since 1985. But the transition from design to product is not easy, and it is only now, after nearly three decades of design services that India has a sizeable number of people capable of making it. "Fabless chipmaking is very complex unlike the Internet business, which is about business model innovation," says Naik of Saankhya Labs.

Not surprisingly, the founders of semiconductor start-ups are usually older - and thus more experienced - than their counterparts in the online business. When Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal started retailing site Flipkart, for instance, in 2007, they were 26 and 25, respectively. In comparison, the Co-founder and CEO of Saankhya Labs Vishwa Kayargadde is 49, while Naik is 42.

The rise of mobile device s is now also helping Indian chipmakers, since they have increased the demand for chips. While products such as desktops may need only one processor and a memory chip, smartphones require at least four chips to work.

There is also the all important matter of funding. Indian venture capitalists are largely reluctant to fund semiconductor companies where developing the product can take as long as four years. Many of the present chipmakers have thus had to find ingenious ways to subsidise their early efforts.

Cosmic Circuits, for instance, began in 2005 as a semiconductor intellectual property company, licensing its technology to other chipmakers and used some of this income to fund its research. Aura Semiconductor started with design services. "When we looked around in 2008, there was no VC funding in the semiconductor space in India," says Kishore Ganti, its Cofounder.

 

Ravi

www.keralites.net

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[www.keralites.net] Story of Naughty Students: The Coin in the Shoes

 

A young man, a student in one of our universities, was one day taking a walk with a professor, who was commonly called the students' friend, from his kindness to those who waited on his instructions. As they went along, they saw lying in the path a pair of old shoes, which they supposed to belong to a poor man who was employed in a field close by, and who had nearly finished his day's work.

The student turned to the professor, saying: "Let us play the man a trick: we will hide his shoes, and conceal ourselves behind those bushes, and wait to see his perplexity when he cannot find them."

"My young friend," answered the professor,"we should never amuse ourselves at the expense someone. But you are rich, and may give yourself a much greater pleasure by means of the poor man. Put a coin into each shoe, and then we will hide ourselves and watch how the discovery affects him."

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The student did so, and they both placed themselves behind the bushes close by. The poor man soon finished his work, and came across the field to the path where he had left his coat and shoes. While putting on his coat he slipped his foot into one of his shoes; but feeling something hard, he stooped down to feel what it was, and found the coin. Astonishment and wonder were seen upon his countenance. He gazed upon the coin, turned it round, and looked at it again and again. He then looked around him on all sides, but no person was to be seen. He now put the money into his pocket, and proceeded to put on the other shoe; but his surprise was doubled on finding the other coin. His feelings overcame him; he fell upon his knees, looked up to heaven and uttered aloud a fervent thanksgiving, in which he spoke of his wife, sick and helpless, and his children without bread, whom the timely bounty, from some unknown hand, would save from perishing.
The student stood there deeply affected, and his eyes filled with tears.

"Now," said the professor, "are you not much better pleased than if you had played your intended trick?"

The youth replied, "You have taught me a lesson which I will never forget. I feel now the truth of those words, which I never understood before:'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'"

Author unknown, retold by Artin Tellalian


--

M Junaid Tahir

 

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[www.keralites.net] Finance Ministry proposes to start Gold Accumulation Plan

 

 
Gold accumulation plan (GAP) is aimed at encouraging households to shift from physical investment in gold into financial assets.
The Finance Ministry has sounded out the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and commercial banks on the possibility of introducing a gold accumulation plan (GAP). The GAP is likely to be pitched as an alternative to direct investment in the yellow metal by gold-obsessed Indian consumers.
A Finance Ministry committee on 'Deepening India's household financial savings' has suggested the introduction of GAP by banks.
GAP is aimed at encouraging households to shift from physical investment in gold, perceived as a dead investment by policy-makers, into financial assets.
As in a recurring deposit scheme, under GAP, investors sign a contract with a bank to invest a fixed sum every month to buy gold. The bank will pool funds from all GAP accounts to buy gold in the futures market. This move will not immediately add to the physical demand for gold. Hence, it could pass muster with the RBI, say bankers. The metal accumulates in the customer's GAP account and can either be sold later or redeemed in the form of coins or bars.
A gold futures contract is a legally binding agreement for delivery of gold in the future at an agreed upon price.
Futures contracts are used by hedgers to manage their price risk on an expected purchase or sale of physical gold. Speculators use the contracts to participate in the markets without any physical backing.
Due to high imports of oil and gold, India's current account deficit (CAD) soared to a historical high of 4.2 per cent of GDP in 2011-12. A CAD results when a country's total imports of goods, services and transfers exceed exports.
Curbing imports
To curb gold imports, the Government has raised the Customs duty.
The RBI has tightened prudential norms for gold loan by non-banking finance companies, whereby they cannot lend beyond 60 per cent of the value of the pledged jewellery.
Given the average household's yen for gold, deeply rooted in the country's culture, an accumulation plan may hold the answer to policy-makers' concerns on physical import of gold.
Best Regards
Prakash Nair

www.keralites.net

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