“Trust in God -- but tie your camel tight.”
Persian Proverb
“परमेश्वर पर भरोसा रखिए - लेकिन अपने ऊंट को भी खूंटे से कस कर बांधे रखिए।”
फ़ारसी कहावत
Friday, January 07, 2022
Quote of the Day January 7, 2022
Current Affairs-January 7, 2022
INDIA
– Cabinet approves MoU between India and Nepal for construction of bridge over Mahakali River at Dharchula (India) – Dharchula (Nepal)
– Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh inaugurates India’s first Open Rock Museum in Hyderabad
– Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh releases Earthquake Risk Maps of Lucknow and Dehradun Cities
– Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah inaugurates, lays foundation stones for 29 development works worth Rs 2,450 crore in Manipur
– Drinking Water Supply Schemes worth Rs. 6,872 crores approved for Rajasthan under Jal Jeevan Mission
– Water Atlas mapping all water bodies in the tiger bearing areas of India released by Union Environment, Forests, and Climate Change Minister, Bhupender Yadav
– Nitin Gadkari inaugurates and lays foundation stones for 572 km of National Highway projects worth Rs.12981 crore in Uttar Pradesh
– PM Modi holds telephonic conversation with Federal Chancellor of Germany Olaf Scholz
– Railway Protection Force deploys 244 Meri Saheli teams at major railway stations across country
– Cabinet approves signing of MoU between India & Turkmenistan on Disaster Management Cooperation
– J&K: 169.75 acres land in Gulmarg, Sonamarg notified as ‘strategic areas’
ECONOMY & CORPORATE
– Govt approves Green Energy Corridor Phase-II with ₹12,000-crore outlay
– Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) launches mega bond sale to raise $3-5 billion from offshore investors
WORLD
– Russia-led military alliance CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) to send peacekeeping forces to Kazakhstan after call for help by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev
– Afghanistan’s Taliban regime not to allow any fencing along Durand Line by Pakistan
– Veteran Chinese diplomat Zhang Ming takes over as new Secretary-General of SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization)
– Oldest US veteran of WWII, Lawrence N. Brooks, dies at 112
Dr. Ronald Weinstein, telepathology pioneer, dies at 83
Weinstein’s drive for advancing telepathology included not only widening medicine’s reach but also bringing greater humanity to it.
Written by Neil Genzlinger
In August 1986, a doctor in Washington, DC, manipulating a microscope, examined a tissue sample from a breast-cancer patient and correctly diagnosed that her tumor had spread. What was unusual about the diagnosis was that the tissue sample and the microscope were half a country away, in El Paso, Texas.
It was a demonstration of a technology, now known as telepathology, which enables specialists to render diagnoses and other medical opinions from afar using various telecommunications technologies. At the time, the internet was in its early stages, fiber optics were not widely available and the high-definition screens now common were unknown. So for a doctor to remotely control a microscope and see a clear enough image to render a conclusion was a significant breakthrough.
The demonstration had been arranged by the founder of Corabi Telemetrics, Dr. Ronald Weinstein, who at the time was also chairman of the pathology department at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago and had led the team that perfected the technology. (In fact, he is credited with coining the term “telepathology.”) He spent the rest of his career furthering telemedicine of various kinds, first in Chicago and then, starting in 1990, at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, where he was a founder of the widely admired Arizona Telemedicine Program.
Weinstein saw early on the potential for telepathology to broaden medical access.
“The limited availability of pathologists in some rural locations and areas serviced by federal medical centers is a bottleneck in the United States health care delivery system,” he wrote in the journal Human Pathology in May 1986, a few months before his groundbreaking demonstration.
By the time he died last month, his early vision of telemedicine’s possibilities had become an integral part of the health care system, not only in pathology but also in numerous other specialties. The Arizona Telemedicine Program, which he directed for 25 years, had “linked more than 160 sites in 70 communities, bringing clinical services — in some cases lifesaving — to hundreds of thousands of patients, many of whom live in Arizona’s medically underserved areas,” Dr. Michael M.I. Abecassis, dean of the College of Medicine, said in announcing Weinstein’s death to the University of Arizona community.
Weinstein’s wife, Mary (Corabi) Weinstein, said he died of heart failure Dec. 3 at a medical center in Tucson, Arizona. He was 83.
Ronald S Weinstein (the S did not stand for anything and carried no period) was born Nov. 20, 1938, in Schenectady, New York, to H. Edward and Shirley (Diamond) Weinstein.
He studied pre-med at Union College in Schenectady, but at his father’s urging took a course in government. He got the top grade and received a Ford Foundation summer fellowship working for Rep. Samuel Stratton of New York — “a transformational education for me,” as he put it in a 2019 Founders Day lecture at the Tucson college. The skills he learned then, he said, served him well all his life, especially in his efforts to bring in government funding for medical initiatives.
After earning a bachelor’s degree at Union College in 1960, he enrolled at Albany Medical College, attending from 1960-63 and also working for several summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In the 2019 lecture, he told the story of mistaking a rumpled older man for a janitor and asking him to empty the trash can, which the man did. A few minutes later, someone told him the “janitor” was actually Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist. He went to apologize, and the Nobelist became a friend and mentor.
He finished his medical education at Tufts University in 1965 and completed his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, which at the time was experimenting with an early telemedicine program linking it by television camera to a clinic at Logan Airport in Boston. He was asked to look in on a few cases and, he said, “that stuck in my mind.”
In 1975 he became chairman of the pathology department at Rush-Presbyterian in Chicago, and 11 years later he was ready to introduce the idea of telepathology, founding Corabi Telemetrics, one of several companies he created or helped create to bring ideas developed in academia to market.
“Sears and Roebuck never intended to get into the financial business,” he said in a speech a few weeks before the 1986 demonstration of his new technology, referring to the retail giant’s expansion into banking at the time. “But somewhere along the line, engineers figured out how to put satellites in space and revolutionized the financial industry. And what I’m going to talk about today is how the very same changes are going to revolutionize the way that we practice medicine.”
Weinstein took his expertise to the University of Arizona in 1990, becoming head of the pathology department at the College of Medicine. By the mid-1990s telemedicine was well established, at least as a concept, and Bob Burns, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives who later became a state senator, had a computer programming background and took an interest in it, securing financing for a statewide initiative.
When the state asked the university to oversee the project, “they gave us the best man they had,” Burns said in a phone interview. That was Weinstein, who was named director when the program was initiated in 1996.
The project, Burns said, made a particular effort to bring medical expertise to remote areas, Indian reservations and prisons — and even abroad, to places like Panama.
Elizabeth A. Krupinski, a longtime colleague and collaborator now at Emory University, said Weinstein had both vision and people skills.
“He had a knack for identifying where and how aspects of health care process and outcomes could be improved, devising a potential solution, then finding the right people to work with to make that vision a reality,” she said by email. “That process always included bringing in people from a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives to truly optimize the results, and to bring in trainees so they could be a part of the future.”
Weinstein’s drive for advancing telepathology included not only widening medicine’s reach but also bringing greater humanity to it. One effort he was involved with, at the Tucson Breast Center, enabled women to have a breast biopsy, get the results and consult with a specialist on the same day, eliminating what could be a long and stressful wait.
That was an issue that frequently came up during Weinstein’s time on the project. “The majority of phone calls I get are from women who want to know where their breast biopsy report is,” he told the journal Health Executive in 2007. “The terror in their voice is really moving.”
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1964, Weinstein is survived by a daughter, Katherine Weinstein Miller; a son, John; and two grandchildren.
Source: Indian Express, 6/01/22
UGC directive to teach courses based on student demand misunderstands academic worth, university autonomy
That is not to say that departments must not align courses to “the marketplace of ideas”. But that presupposes a degree of autonomy — the freedom to design courses, and draw up syllabi — that few public universities in India enjoy.
The University Grants Commission (UGC)’s letter to central universities, asking them to teach courses based on student demand, is based on questionable academic logic. How many students queue up for a course often reflects how much it boosts the chances of their employment. While important, for a university, that must not be the only metric in determining the span of its academic ambition. The work of producing knowledge, training students in critical thinking and pushing ideas towards new frontiers — the reasons why societies invest in universities — cannot rest on a narrow, instrumentalist approach. That is to say, a university must make space for arcane philosophy as much as economics, even if there are few takers for the former. Seen in this light, the UGC’s insistence that courses be taught or stopped based on the number of enrolled students seems rather short-sighted. The Delhi University Democratic Teachers’ Front has said that it fears that “rationalising” courses in this manner would have grim consequences for social science and language departments, as well as job losses for those who teach in them.
That is not to say that departments must not align courses to “the marketplace of ideas”. But that presupposes a degree of autonomy — the freedom to design courses, and draw up syllabi — that few public universities in India enjoy. Universities also need resources as much as autonomy. The National Education Policy 2020’s ambitions for education and call for greater autonomy to higher educational institutions is undercut by several factors, from the slashing of funds to the challenges of inequality. The NEP’s emphasis on inter-disciplinary learning cannot also be served by shrinking the platter of courses on offer. The lack of autonomy is also reflected in the shrinking space for free thought in universities. The growing state hostility to debates and dissent shows up in the desire of governments to vet the subject of webinars or to sanitise classrooms of all contentious ideas in the name of nationalism.
True, one of the biggest challenges of the higher education system is its inability to produce employable graduates in sufficiently large numbers. While universities and colleges must do more on this front, the decision of how to maximise their resources, how to hit the sweet spot between academic ambition and market pragmatism, must be left to the teaching community. Each university will find the answer to that question on its own terms. The UGC must not impose top-down criteria that further shrink the space for experimentation and innovation in higher education.
Source: Indian Express, 6/01/22
Worrying trends in nutrition indicators in NFHS-5 data
Veena S Rao writes: India’s nutrition programmes must undergo a periodic review addressing gaps such as institutional delivery and adolescent anaemia
The NFHS-5 factsheets for India and all states and Union territories are now out. At first glance, it appears to be a mixed bag — much to cheer about, but concern areas remain.
The good news is that there seems to be a change in our demographic trends, particularly in the sex ratio. For the first time since the NFHS 1992-93 survey, the sex ratio is slightly higher among the adult population. It is also for the first time in 15 years that the sex ratio at birth has reached 929 (it was 919 for 1,000 males in 2015-16).
The total fertility rate has also dropped from 2.2 per cent to a replacement rate of 2 per cent, albeit with not much change in the huge fertility divide between the high and low fertility states. It appears that states which were already experiencing a decline in fertility rates have continued to do so, without much change in the trends in the higher fertility states. This fertility divide can have several socio-economic and political repercussions in any society. One assumes that adequate attention will be given to this challenge at the policymaking and social levels after the detailed report is out. But, clearly, policies and programmes for the girl child and women’s empowerment have produced positive results, and a direct correlation between higher female literacy, the improvement in the sex ratio, and the decrease in the total fertility rate can easily be drawn.
There has been an appreciable improvement in general literacy levels and in the percentage of women and men who have completed 10 years or more of schooling, which has reached 41 per cent and 50.2 per cent respectively. Of course, much remains to be done, especially because these figures imply that around half of our workforce still does not have the qualifications and skills to achieve upward mobility and escape the poverty trap.
The health sector deserves credit for achieving a significant improvement in the percentage of institutional births, antenatal care, and children’s immunisation rates. There has also been a consistent drop in neonatal, infant and child mortality rates — a decrease of around 1 per cent per year for neonatal and infant mortality and a 1.6 per cent decrease per year for under five mortality rate.
Now turning to the areas of concern — nutrition or nutrition-related indicators. To begin with, India has become a country with more anaemic people since NFHS-4 (2015-16), with anaemia rates rising significantly across age groups, ranging from children below six years, adolescent girls and boys, pregnant women, and women between 15 to 49 years. Almost half our human capital lacks iron power.
The insidious, adverse effects of anaemia affect all age groups — lower physical and cognitive growth and alertness among children and adolescents, and lesser capacity to learn and play, directly impacting their future potential as productive citizens. Lower capacity to work and quick fatigue for adolescents and adults, translates into lower work output and lesser earnings. Further, anaemia among adolescent girls (59.1 per cent) advances to maternal anaemia and is a major cause of maternal and infant mortality and general morbidity and ill health in a community.
Though there has been some improvement, an area of concern is the poor consumption of IFA tablets by pregnant women. Perhaps the detailed report will explain why a dedicated programme like Anaemia Mukt Bharat which focused on IFA consumption failed to gain impetus.
Equally worrying is the exceedingly slow pace of improvement in nutritional indicators across all age groups. Between NFHS 4 and NFHS 5, the percentage of children below five years who are moderately underweight has reduced from 35.8 per cent to 32.1 per cent, moderately stunted children have fallen from 38.4 per cent to 35.5 per cent, moderately wasted from 21 per cent to 19.3 per cent and severely wasted have increased slightly from 7.5 per cent to 7.7 per cent. Details regarding severely stunted and underweight children will be published in the detailed report.
The root cause for this is that the percentage of children below two years receiving an adequate diet is a mere 11.3 per cent, increasing marginally from 9.6 per cent in NFHS-4. This foundational nutritional deficit which ought to be considered an indicator of great concern, is generally ignored by policy makers and experts. Unless this is addressed, rapid improvement in nutritional indicators cannot happen.
India’s nutrition programmes must undergo a periodic review, just as our health programmes did right from the Reproductive and Child Health (RCH) programme in 1997 to the present National Health Mission (NHM), addressing gaps such as institutional delivery, ambulance services, adolescent anaemia, and additional health volunteers. The Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), which is perceived as the guardian of the nation’s nutritional well-being must reassess itself and address critical intervention gaps, both conceptually and programmatically, and produce rapid outcomes. Ad hoc add-ons are just not enough, and smartphones, tweets and webinars cannot substitute hard action on the ground.
Written by Veena S Rao
Source: Indian Express, 7/01/22
Thursday, January 06, 2022
Quote of the Day January 6, 2022
“Don't bunt. Aim out of the ball park. Aim for the company of immortals.”
David Ogilvy
“गेंद को दो रन के लिए सरकाइए मत। उसे मैदान से बाहर पहुंचाने के लिए निशाना साधिए। अमर व्यक्तियों के साथ का लक्ष्य बनाइए।”
डेविड ऑगिल्वी
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)