New advisory board on pre-natal tests to meet Wednesday |  |
- New advisory board on pre-natal tests to meet Wednesday
- Delhi to open rehab centre for teens
- Cancer typifies unmoored instability: Pulitzer winner
- Siddhartha Mukherjee won Pulitzer for his book on Cancer
- New booklet about modern Antarctic science
| New advisory board on pre-natal tests to meet Wednesday Posted: 19 Apr 2011 09:22 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, April 19 - Aiming to form policies to discourage sex selection and female foeticide in India, especially with the latest census showing a low child sex ratio, a new advisory board on pre-natal tests is to meet Wednesday. The newly-constituted Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques panel was reconstituted earlier this month after the preliminary Census report showed the lowest child sex ration since independence. 'The board will review implementation of the Pre-conception & Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 -,' a health ministry official said Tuesday. State Secretaries of 17 States/UTs, which showed particularly skewed sex ratios in the recent census, have been called with the objective to send home the message to undertake more effective implementation of the PC & PNDT Act to prevent sex determination, he said. Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Gujarat, Delhi, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Bihar are the states that will be present at the meeting. Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad chairs the board while Women and Child Development Minister Krishna Tirath is co-chair. Health Secretary K. Chandramouli is vice-chairman of the 35-member board. The PC & PNDT Act bans the use of sex selection techniques before or after conception as well as misuse of pre-natal diagnostic techniques for sex selective abortions. However, with the preliminary report of 2011 Census showing lowest child sex ratio - since independence, the health ministry is now taking steps to control the trend of sex-selection. According to 2011 census, child sex ratio - declined to reach an all time low of 914, from 927 in the 2001 census. http://www.rxpgnews.com    |
| Delhi to open rehab centre for teens Posted: 19 Apr 2011 08:49 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, April 19 - Delhi government will open a treatment and rehabilitation centre Wednesday for adolescent drug abuse victims, a statement said Tuesday. The Sahyog Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre for Adolescents at Sewa Kutir in Kingsway Camp in north Delhi is a public private partnership model initiative with guidance from the judiciary, the statement added. 'The centre will host world-class child centric services such as detoxification and emergency treatment, psychosocial treatment for the total recovery of the addict through re-education, games and story-telling,' it said. Drug abuse puts adolescents at increased risk for alcohol-related and drug-related traffic accidents, risky sexual practices, juvenile delinquency, and future use disorders. The government noted that juvenile drug abuse is becoming common these days because of the easy access to different street drugs. The Delhi legal services authority, juvenile justice committee, the department of women and child development and the society for promotion of youth and masses - have partnered for the project. The centre will be inaugurated by Supreme Court judge Altamas Kabir Wednesday. http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Cancer typifies unmoored instability: Pulitzer winner Posted: 19 Apr 2011 08:33 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) Cancer is often described as a 'modern' illness because its metaphors are so modern. It is a disease of overproduction, of fulminant growth tipped into the abyss of no control, says Pulitzer Prize winning writer and oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee in his book, 'The Emperor of Maladies: A Biography of Cancer'. 'The notion of cancer as an affliction that belongs paradigmatically to the 20th century is reminiscent, as Susan Sontag argued so powerfully in her book, 'Illness as Metaphor', of another disease once considered emblematic of another era: Tuberculosis in the 19th century,' Mukherjee compares. 'Both drain vitality, both stretch out the encounter with death, in both cases 'dying', even more than death, defines the illness,' Mukherjee says. According to the specialist, 'cancer is an expansionist disease'. It invades the tissue; 'sets up colonies in hostile landscapes, seeking sanctuary in one organ and then migrating to another. 'It lives dangerously, inventively, fiercely, territorially, cannily, and defensively - at times as if teaching us how to survive. To confront cancer is to confront another species, one perhaps more adapted to survive then even we are,' Mukherjee says. In writing this book, he started off by imagining the project as a 'history' of cancer. 'But it felt inescapably as if I were not writing about something but about someone. My subject daily morphed into something that resembled an individual - an enigmatic, if somewhat deranged, image in a mirror. This was not so much a medical history of an illness, but something more personal, more visceral in biography,' he writes. To begin with, every biographer must confront the birth of his subject, the writer says. 'Where was cancer born?' 'How old is cancer?' In 1862, Edwin Smith, part scholar and part huckster, antique forger and Egyptologist, bought - a 15-foot-long papyrus from an antique seller in Luxor in Egypt. 'The papyrus was in dreadful condition,... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| Siddhartha Mukherjee won Pulitzer for his book on Cancer Posted: 19 Apr 2011 06:28 PM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) New Delhi, April 19 - When Indian American Siddhartha Mukherjee, a cancer specialist, called his mother at 1 a.m. Tuesday to say he had won the Pulitzer, she thought he was pulling a fast one. The Mukherjee home in the capital's Safdarjung Enclave has been flooded with congratulatory calls since morning. For Siddhartha's publisher Harper-Collins, it was yet another feather in the cap. 'It came as a complete surprise. Siddhartha called us at 1 and asked if we were awake. I said of course not - senior citizens don't stay up so late. Then he told me that he has won this prize and I just couldn't believe it,' Mukherjee's mother Chandana, who lives in Delhi, told IANS. Siddhartha, 41, is a New York-based cancer specialist who won this year's Pulitzer in the general non-fiction category for his book 'The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer'. In the book, Siddhartha examines cancer with a cellular biologist's precision, a historian's perspective and a biographer's passion, says the publisher. The result is an eloquent chronicle of a disease humans have lived with - and perished from - for more than 5,000 years. A resident of Safdarjung Enclave, homemaker Chandana said she and her husband Sibeswai Mukherjee have been flooded with calls since early Tuesday after the news broke out. 'There have been a lot of calls.' Asked if they would fly down to meet their son to celebrate the occasion, she said they would go only in June. 'We had planned our vacation well in advance and have our tickets booked for June. So we are not advancing that. We will be going for a month or a month-and-a-half. Then the celebrations are going to happen with Siddhartha, his wife and the kids and his wife's family,' Chandana said. The Delhi-born doctor's book is a worldwide bestseller, including in India, where 'readers are more inclined to reading fictions', a spokesperson for the capital-based Midland Book Store chain told IANS. 'Siddhartha... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
| New booklet about modern Antarctic science Posted: 19 Apr 2011 05:00 AM PDT ( From http://www.rxpgnews.com ) The National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs is making available a new full-color, extensively illustrated booklet that highlights the variety of cutting-edge science conducted in Antarctica at the three year-round stations the United States maintains on the continent. The booklet, which is available on-line, is aimed primarily at a middle-school audience and is designed to be useful as supplementary material for classroom teachers in a variety of subjects. The 60-page booklet, Antarctica: A Journey of Discovery, was written and designed by the NSF-funded, Lincoln, Neb.-based Antarctic geological Drilling (ANDRILL) project. NSF funds the U.S. participation in ANDRILL, a multinational collaboration comprised of more than 200 scientists, students, and educators from five nations, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Antarctica: A Journey of Discovery provides a basic introduction to subjects as diverse as the food web of the Southern Ocean-which includes penguins, orcas and shrimp-like Krill; the use of ice cores to establish a climate record extending back nearly a million years; state-of-the-art particle physics as carried out at the South Pole; and how Antarctic geology yields clues to our planet's past and its development. The booklet also includes a brief history of Antarctic exploration, both historical and modern, and material about how modern-day researchers prepare to work on the world's coldest, highest and driest continent. The content focuses on examples of science that are carried out at the individual U.S. Antarctic Program stations; Palmer, on the Antarctic Peninsula; McMurdo, on Ross Island; and Amundsen-Scott at the geographic South Pole. Through its Office of Polar Programs, NSF manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, which manages all U.S. scientific research and related logistics on the southernmost continent and aboard ships in the Southern Ocean. As is true across... http://www.rxpgnews.com   |
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