Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
ZIKA
ZIKA: ______ _____ Prologue: On 18 April 1947, a rhesus monkey that researchers identified as 766 ran a fever of 39.7°C, about 2°C higher than normal. The monkey was part of a study hunting for yellow fever virus and was living in a cage on a platform built into the tree canopy in the 1.5-kilometer-long Zika Forest, which runs adjacent to an arm of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Three days later, the investigators took a blood sample from Rhesus 766 and injected it into the brains of Swiss albino mice. The mice “showed signs of sickness” after 10 days, and the researchers harvested their brains, from which they isolated a “new filterable transmissible agent.” Come January of the following year, the same researchers trapped mosquitoes from these canopy platforms and took them to the lab, hoping to isolate yellow fever virus. Others had shown that one of these species they […]
SWEATING
SWEATING: _____ _____ Prologue: Sweating is an essential and natural biological process that starts soon after we are born. Sweat is a weak salt solution produced by the sweat glands of skin. These are distributed over the entire body but are most numerous on the palms and soles. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the significance of sweating has been recognized, whereas our understanding of the mechanisms and controllers of sweating has largely developed during the past century. Heat dissipation is vital for our survival during exercise and heat stress. In humans, the primary mechanism of heat dissipation, particularly when ambient temperature is higher than skin temperature, is evaporative heat loss secondary to sweat secretion from sweat glands. Normally humans produce as much as one liter of sweat per day; however most of this evaporates as soon as it is produced so we don’t notice it. The body produces […]
EXERCISE
EXERCISE: _ _ Prologue: The big four “proximate” causes of preventable ill-health are: smoking, poor nutrition, lack of physical activity and alcohol excess. Of these, the importance of regular exercise is the least well-known. However, exercise is not a new concept. In 300 BC, Aristotle suggested that “a man falls into ill health as a result of not caring for exercise.” These factors (smoking, nutrition, lack of physical activity and alcohol) are often described as lifestyle choices, yet many people do not have the finances, self-efficacy, environment or knowledge to be able to practice lifestyle choices correctly. We have moved towards a sedentary society with changing work and domestic habits & patterns. We now drive cars, sit in front of computers or TVs and use domestic appliances. There are far fewer manual jobs. This means that physical activity is not routine for most people. In 1949, 34% of miles travelled […]
NET NEUTRALITY
NET NEUTRALITY: _ _ I am reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s remark: “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty. We all declare for liberty, but in using the same word we do not mean the same thing.” Substitute ‘net neutrality’ for ‘liberty’, and that’s where we are today. The Internet has unleashed innovation, enabled growth, and inspired freedom more rapidly and extensively than any other technological advance in human history. Its independence is its power. Net neutrality means internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data on internet equally. The ISPs have structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the internet and the speed at which it is delivered. And the present internet network operators, principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the internet to leverage their control of internet […]
VACCINE
_____ VACCINE: The figure above shows a victim of smallpox. ______ Prologue: “You let a doctor take a dainty, helpless baby, and put that stuff from a cow, which has been scratched and had dirt rubbed into her wound, into that child. Even, the Jennerians now admit that infant vaccination spreads disease among children. More mites die from vaccination than from the disease they are supposed to be inoculated against.” –George Bernard Shaw, 1929. The world has come a long way since George Bernard Shaw fulminated against vaccination in the 1920s. Small pox was declared eradicated from world in 1980 largely due to small pox vaccine. In 2008, Barack Obama called science on vaccines ‘inconclusive’. But in 2015, the same Barack Obama called science on vaccines “indisputable”. Vaccination was voted by readers of the British Medical Journal in 2007 as one of the four most important developments in medicine of […]
