UN plans to end AIDS threat by 2030

• SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

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U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon addresses the opening of the General Assembly high-level meeting on ending AIDS on June 8.

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civil and public service

government health care

Includes time-bound global targets to be reached over the next five years and end the epidemic as public health threat by 2030

Speaking at a high-level meeting on HIV/AIDS at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Thursday, Health Minister J.P. Nadda reiterated India’s commitment to fast track progress on ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030.

At the meeting, member states adopted a new political declaration, including time-bound global targets to be reached over the next five years and end the epidemic as a public health threat by 2030.

The UNGA meeting brings together heads of state and government, people living with HIV (PLHIVs), and donor organisations, to reiterate their commitments made in the Political Declaration on HIV and AIDS and to set the world on course to end the epidemic by 2030 within the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Mr. Nadda has proposed a five-point strategy to end AIDS. He stated that India was committed to enforcing TRIPS flexibilities to make drugs affordable. “India is proud of being one of the leading partners in the global fight against AIDS epidemic. These remarkable successes would not have been possible without access to affordable medicines. The low cost generic medicines produced by the Indian pharmaceutical industry have been instrumental in scaling up access to HIV treatment not only in India but in other parts of the world. More than 80% of the antiretroviral drugs used globally are supplied by the Indian pharmaceutical industry,” he said.

The five-point strategy includes adoption of the fast track target — reaching 90% of all people in need with HIV treatment — committed to maintain the TRIPS flexibilities; creating an inclusive society with programmes that work towards restoring the respect and dignity of individuals, and lastly, global solidarity. “Prevention must be our primary goal. Prevention must not be forgotten. We need to increase investments. This is the time for developed countries to do more, not less. We are in this fight together to end the AIDS epidemic,” said Mr. Nadda, addressing the high-level meeting.

The world has achieved Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 6 — which was to halt and reverse the AIDS epidemic by 2015. However, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed that an action taken now could avert an estimated 17.6 million new infections and 11 million premature deaths between 2016 and 2030. “We must make a radical change within the next five years, if we are to achieve that goal. That requires commitment at every level: from the global health infrastructure, to all Member States, civil society organisations and non-governmental organisations, to the United Nations Security Council that has dealt with AIDS as a humanitarian issue and a threat to human and national security.”

The Secretary-General called on the international community to reinforce and expand on the “unique, multi-sector, multi-actor approach” of UNAIDS, and to ensure that the annual target of $26 billion in funding, including $13 billion for the next three years, is met.

Keywords: HIV/AIDS, United Nations General Assembly, Ban Ki-moon, J.P. Nadda

Top fitness apps this season

• MEENAKSHI R.

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Fitness is all about balancing physical activities and food consumption. Photo: K.R. Deepak

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physical fitness

Here’s a list of apps to help you achieve your fitness goals.

Are you all about fitness? Do you drink diet coke instead of a regular soda? Did you have a cake along with lunch? How much should you workout to burn the calories?

The 7 Minute Workout

iOS/Android: Most fitness apps are motivating, but this one acts like our own personal trainer. The words '7 minutes' would make even a couch potato feel better about themselves after those seven minutes of workout. The 7 Minute Workout has different categories, of course.

The classic workout, for those who want overall fitness. It has specific instructions and once we press start, it kicks off with a whistle and a ding to announce that the minute is over. Every workout has a gap of about 10 seconds, to allow us to catch our breath.

Other workouts, such as the abs workout and the butt and leg workout, get unlocked if we keep doing the classic workout for a while.

Workout Trainer

iOS/Android: With this we have a choice of which area we want to focus on. Do you want to strengthen your core, or build some muscle, or target your upper/lower body, improve flexibility or lose weight? We can set many types of preferences based on one's needs.

The app even has a yoga schedule for those who want to work on their flexibility. We can schedule workouts with this app and can set the number of days we want to workout in a week. Workout Trainer, by Skimble Inc. has exercise for starters, weight loss basics, health warmup, amazing abs attack, speed workout routine and more.

The app even recommends certain programmes based on one's needs, as mentioned in the preferences. Some of the workout regimes are paid packages.

Yoga-pedia

iOS/Android: What fitness regime is complete without yoga? Stay relaxed, stay flexible with the use of this app that teaches yoga even for beginners who aren't sure of which asanas to use.

This app allows the user to sort the ones that they want, based on whether they are using yoga to relieve stress or to improve flexibility or to stimulate the brain and so on. There are video instructions and 80+ asanas by category.

Calorie counter MyFitnessPal

iOS/Android: Your workout is basically just one aspect of getting fit. The other aspect, a crucial one at that, is to monitor the intake of calories every day. This app lets you log your calories, and gives you access to a database with a huge list of food items, so there’s a good chance that you may find your food in it.

A pro version is also available, and this app lets you login through a website as well, so you can connect to it via a PC. And not to forget, this also gives you an option to import recipes, and supports other fitness apps and wearables as well.

Endomondo

iOS/Android: This app lets you track your fitness, analyse your performance, set goals, take challenges, and even add pictures and tag your friends and do much more. The company behind this, Endomondo.com, assures you that this app is top rated and your personal trainer. The premium version gives you access to exclusive training features for a small sum, and offers personalised training, not to forget that it is ad-free when you go premium.

With support for Android Wear, you can get your calorie and nutrition information from MyFitnessPal right in the app, connect with Google Fit to add workout data to your dashboard and use your favorite wearable devices to track, including Garmin, Gear, Pebble, and Android Wear.

Google Fit

Google’s very own fitness app cannot be ignored here. This app lets you track any activity effortlessly. Walk, run, or cycle and your phone or wearables will log that information automatically with Google Fit.

As with other apps Google fit also lets you track your well-being using Android tabs, phones, wearables as well as from the web.

Keywords: fitness apps

Walnuts may shield you from colon cancer

• IANS

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Walnuts at a wholesale market on the outskirts of Jammu.

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Eating 28 grams of walnuts everyday may change gut bacteria in a way that suppresses colon cancer, a new research has found.

“Our results show for the first time that walnut consumption may reduce colon tumour development,” said principal investigator Daniel Rosenberg of University of Connecticut Health Centre in the US.

The researchers found that mice that ate seven-ten per cent of their total calories as walnuts developed fewer colon cancers.

The effect was most pronounced in male mice, which had 2.3 times fewer tumours when fed walnuts as part of a western diet.

That is equivalent to a human eating about an ounce of walnuts (28.3 grams) a day, the study said.

“There is accumulating evidence that eating walnuts may offer a variety of benefits related to health issues like cancer. This study shows that walnuts may also act as a probiotic to make the colon healthy, which in turn offers protection against colon tumours,” the investigator noted.

The findings were reported in the journal Cancer Prevention Research.

Walnuts are packed with compounds known to be important nutritionally. They have the most polyunsaturated fatty acids of all the commonly eaten tree nuts, as well as the highest ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 fatty acids, and high levels of a form of Vitamin E with anti-cancer properties.

But walnuts are not merely the sum of their chemical parts, and it may be as a whole food that they pack the most significant anti-cancer punch against colon cancer, the third most common cancer in the world.

To figure out why walnuts were beneficial, the team took fecal samples from the mice and analysed the communities of bacteria living in their digestive tracts.

They found that walnut consumption tended to push the gut microbiome toward an ecology that was potentially protective against cancer.

Because the studies were done only in mice, more testing needs to be done in humans before walnuts can be unequivocally recommended as a cancer-prevention agent.

Keywords: walnuts, health benefits, colon cancer

The spectre of superbugs

Sabrina Tavernise & Denise Grady June 07, 2016, The New York Times

Military researchers in the US have identified the first patient in the United States to be infected with bacteria that are resistant to an antibiotic that was the last resort against drug-resistant germs. The patient is well now, but the case raises the spectre of superbugs that could cause untreatable infections, because the bacteria can easily transmit their resistance to other germs that are already resistant to additional antibiotics. The resistance can spread because it arises from loose genetic material that bacteria typically share with one another.

“Think of a puzzle,” said Dr Beth Bell, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA. “You need lots of different pieces to get a result that is resistant to everything. This is the last piece of that puzzle, unfortunately, in the United States. We have that genetic element that would allow for bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic.”

The bacteria are resistant to a drug called colistin, an old antibiotic that in the United States is held in reserve to treat especially dangerous infections that are resistant to a class of drugs called carbapenems. If carbapenem-resistant bacteria, called CRE, also pick up resistance to colistin, they will be unstoppable. “This is huge,” said Dr Lance Price, a researcher at George Washington University. “We are one step away from CRE strains that cannot be treated with antibiotics. We now have all the pieces in place for it to be untreatable.”

The gene for resistance to colistin was first found in China, where the drug is used in pig and poultry farming. Researchers reported its discovery there in November. It has also been found in the intestine of one pig in the United States. CRE is still relatively rare, causing just 600 deaths a year, but by 2013, researchers had identified it in healthcare facilities in 44 states. Dr Thomas R Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. often calls it the “nightmare superbug,” because it is resistant to all but one antibiotic — colistin.

“We risk being in a post-antiobiotic world,” Dr Thomas said. “That wouldn’t just be urinary tract infections or pneumonia — that could be for the 6,00,000 patients a year who need cancer treatment.” He added, “The medicine cabinet is empty for some patients.”

The colistin resistance in the United States came to light when a 49-year-old woman, who Dr Beth said was “connected ...to the military,” was treated for a urinary infection at a military clinic in Pennsylvania. Because her urine culture had unusual results, the sample was sent to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which identified the drug resistance. The bacteria, though resistant to colistin and some other antibiotics, were not resistant to carbapenems. Doctors there published a report on the case in a medical journal.

Sample analysis
Patrick McGann, a scientist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and lead author of the paper, said researchers had only started analysing samples a few weeks ago. They tested samples from 6 patients, and one of them was the woman’s. Dr Beth said researchers did not know how the patient contracted the resistant bacteria. The microbes have been found in people in Asia and Europe, but the patient had not traveled during the past 5 months. It is possible that she contracted the bacteria from food, or from contact with someone else who was infected, Dr Beth said. Public health workers will interview the woman and will probably test her family members and other close contacts for the bacteria, she said.

Infectious disease doctors have long warned that overuse of antibiotics in people and in animals put human health at risk by reducing the power of the drugs, some of modern medicine’s most prized jewels. About 2 million Americans fall ill from antibiotic-resistant bacteria every year and at least 23,000 die from those infections. 

The CRE germs usually strike people receiving medical care in hospitals or nursing homes, including patients on breathing machines or dependent on catheters. Healthy people are rarely, if ever, affected. 

But the bugs attack broadly, and the infections they cause are not limited to people with severely compromised immune systems. CRE was believed to be the cause of infections from improperly cleaned medical scopes that led to the death of 2 people at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in California last year.

The splendour and the nitty-gritty of genes

Abigail Zuger June 07, 2016, The New York Times

Twins born minutes apart may be eerily similar or just as eerily different. Even if they are not identical, they share yards of genetic material, and yet one turns out large and one small, one strong and one weak, one a poet and the other a mumbler. We see these disparities in people all the time. And now we see them in a pair of books on the gene, published on the same day. Sharing yards of genetic material, both works aim to explain the power and mystery of the human genome, yet could not be more different.

A cancer physician at Columbia University, Dr Siddhartha Mukherjee dazzled readers with his Pulitzer-winning The Emperor of All Maladies in 2010. That achievement was evidently just a warm-up for his virtuoso performance in The Gene: An Intimate History, in which he braids Science, History and memoir into an epic with all the range and biblical thunder of ‘Paradise Lost’.

Like all natural storytellers, Dr Siddhartha knows to begin at the beginning. To explain the gene, he heads back to the ancient Greeks who first struggled to explain how fathers and sons could be so similar and yet so different. To explain his own family, he must revisit partition-era India, where two of his father’s brothers succumbed to serious mental illness, a scourge that claimed one of his first cousins as well.

Those are some bad genes: They dog Dr Siddhartha’s heels as he writes, but like so many inheritances, they are complicated and disguised, muffled yet threatening. Slowly his story weaves past the usual landmarks: Mendel’s peas, Darwin’s finches, Watson and Crick’s rough cardboard models of component nucleosides. The alphabet of the gene creates the words and sentences of the genome. The eugenicists who glom on to fledgling science to purify the race contribute their own vicious story line, stretching from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr to Adolf Hitler and beyond.

“Of all the sciences, biology is the most lawless,” he writes. Now we have become fluent enough in its language not only to understand what laws there are, but also to draft new ones. It is a familiar narrative with a big difference: Thanks to Dr Siddhartha’s remarkably clear and compelling prose, the reader has a fighting chance of arriving at the story of today’s genetic manipulations with an actual understanding of both the immensely complicated science and the even more complicated moral questions.

From the ground up
Looking to the future, Dr Siddhartha worries that “illness might progressively vanish but so might identity. Grief might be diminished but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might history.” All who contemplate such a world should understand its origins, and Dr Siddhartha ’s readers will get it from the ground up.

Dr Steven Lipkin lacks Dr Siddhartha’s skills; even with a co-author, he struggles mightily in The Age of Genomes: Tales From the Front Lines of Genetic Medicine to explain the scientific concepts underlying his work. What Lipkin does have are patients. A clinical geneticist in New York City, he is among those charged with translating complicated principles into viable medical practice. In his work, Dr Steven meets patients like “Lydia,” who worries that because she looks like her mother she is fated to die young of the same ovarian cancer.

There is “Samantha,” who suffers from a dire genetic syndrome that precludes safe pregnancy. There is “Sean,” a surfer dude with a relatively mild genetic condition that is ruining his sex life. As in the rest of clinical medicine, though, nothing is entirely predictable for these patients. Lydia is relieved to hear she has little chance of developing her mother’s cancer, but expresses exactly zero interest in knowing more about her father’s early Alzheimer’s disease, a far more heritable condition.

Samantha would routinely be advised to avoid pregnancy at all costs, save for one small detail: She shows up for her first appointment with a healthy baby boy on one knee. Her one uneventful pregnancy complicates decision making about subsequent ones. As for Sean, a honed state-of-the-art treatment to prop up his mutant genes is available. Unfortunately, it is very expensive, and he is uninsured.

Insurance is a scientific concept that Dr Siddhartha does not include in his glorious tour of human genetics, but it governs the work of clinicians who must plead, bargain and appeal for indicated tests and treatments to be approved. The society that rewrites the genetic code, as Lipkin points out, is likely to become one in which the very expensive tools of genetic medicine forge yet one more barrier between rich and poor.

When Dr Steven sequences his own genome, he runs into another feature of the landscape Dr Siddhartha overlooks: the proliferation of cut-rate, poorly standardised services out there. Lipkin first springs for a cheap genotype and gets what he pays for in the form of a syndrome he knows perfectly well he doesn’t have. A better test corrects the error.

These stories from the trenches make it clear that the clinical genetics will not be spared the misery-inducing features of the rest of medicine, in which the reigning slogan is “caveat emptor.” Let the poet sing his long, lovely epic; it is still the harried, inarticulate, much beleaguered guy in the white coat who will be cementing the transactions.

Even kids under 10 not free from drug menace

Gautam Dheer Chandigarh, June 11, 2016, dhns:

The controversy over Udta Punjab has once again brought to fore Punjab’s drug menace, which according to one study had even gripped children below the age of 10, although in a minuscule number. 

Almost all studies on drug abuse in Punjab conducted in the last decade have brought out one thing in common — that over 70% of Punjab youth in the 16-35 age group suffer from addiction. A study by the Institute of Development and Communication (IDC) in 2010 says 3% of them are below 10 years of age. The ruling SAD-BJP government dismissed the magnitude of drug menace saying it’s an opposition ploy to defame Punjab youth even as the Congress and the AAP accuses the ruling alliance for the mess. 

The study stated that drug abuse was a “historical problem” and not a recent phenomenon, IDC chairman Dr Promod Kumar told DH. “Political nexus” is also not new, he said.

Shielding eyes this summer

• RAJEEV JAIN

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A swimmer wearing goggles Photo E. Lakshmi Narayanan.

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The summer season is upon us and so is the rising temperature. Just before the start of the season, we start getting worried about skin problems associated with summers. But, hardly pay heed to our eyes. Our eyes, being the most sensitive organ of our body, are highly prone to developing various eye problems, especially in summer.

Summers are marked by high levels of humidity. Such weather conditions are usually more suitable for different allergies to grow. Apart from humidity, dust and pollution too adds to the factors causing eye allergies. Often in the summers, we complain about redness and itchiness in the eyes followed by a burning sensation. All these are common symptoms of an allergy, which should not be ignored. Several bacterial eye infections also spread during summers.

Stay protected from conjunctivitis

Another common eye problem in summers is conjunctivitis. Redness, pricking sensation in the eyes along with watery discharge from the eyes are symptoms to identify conjunctivitis. So, if you notice any such symptoms, never ignore them as that may worsen the infection. Take immediate medical supervision and use antibiotic eye drops suggested by the doctor. Also, don’t share your personal belongings like a towel or handkerchief, if you are suffering from conjunctivitis.

Enjoy swimming, but with care

Swimming is considered to be the best leisure activity by many, to get rid of the summer heat. But, because of the extreme humid conditions, pools can be a great place for bacteria to breed which can cause infections. Chemicals like chlorine are also added to the water in order to clean. But these chemicals can cause irritation and redness in the eyes. So, it is advised that before one step into the swimming pool, make sure that the water is clean. Secondly, always wear protective goggles while swimming so that your eyes stay protected from any kind of bugs, dirt or bacteria.

Don’t let your eyes dry

Also in summer season, cases of dry eye syndrome increases rapidly. This happens because the tear film in our eyes starts getting dry due to increased temperature, which causes itchiness in the eyes. The best way to protect your eyes from dry eye syndrome is to keep them hydrated. Use of lubricating eye drops prescribed by the doctor can be very helpful in soothing the eyes and keeping them moisturize.

Quick tips

General eye care is also necessary to keep eye problems away. When out in the sun, always wear dark sunglasses which are UV protected, as they shield your eyes from the harmful UV rays of the sun. Make sure to wash your eyes with tap water two to three times daily, especially if your routine involves travelling or any other outdoor activities. Try to stay away from dust as exposure to dust and dirt can be one of the major causes of eye injuries and subsequent problems. In case, there is any irritation in the eyes, never rub them; instead wash your eye quickly with water. If sitting in an AC room, avoid direct contact with the eyes. While swimming, always wear protective glasses.

Further, having a proper sleep of minimum eight hours is very important for healthy eyes. Drink eight to ten glasses of water daily in order to keep both your body and eyes hydrated. Make exercise a part of your daily routine as it helps in maintaining proper blood circulation in the body.

Keywords: Rajeev Jain, eyes, summer