Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
ALCOHOL
ALCOHOL: Today, I will discuss the most controversial topic for about 12000 years,namely, Alcohol.The alcohol is consumed by 80 % of people at some time in their lives. Alcohol or Ethanol or Ethyl Alcohol is defined as an organic compound composed of carbon,hydrogen and oxygen atoms with the molecular configuration as CH3CH2OH. I will not discuss other alcohols like methyl alcohol,propyl alcohol etc etc. The human beings have been consuming alcohol in various alcoholic beverages since 10000 year BC…. I wrote my thesis on alcohol in the year 1986 for my MD exam and concluded that the life-span of a heavy alcoholic is reduced by 12 years; and one out of six deaths in a government hospital is related to alcoholism.I was novice and naive then and the sample size of my study was limited. Whisky is a short form of usquebaugh where uisce means water and bethad means of […]
THE SWINE FLU
NOVEL H1N1 INFLUENZA OF THE YEAR 2009 (Misnomer- Swine Flu) Prologue: I never wanted to write on this subject because information is readily available on TV but as usual, Media is creating panic in the mind of people by showing every death as breaking news. Abbreviation used: Novel H1N1 influenza = H1N1 flu = HNF Let us start with number of deaths per year due to various infectious diseases in the world. Infectious disease deaths in millions Pneumonia 4.18 Diarrhea 2.16 HIV 2.08 TB 1.46 Malaria 1.3 Seasonal flu 0.5 HNF 0.002 People can see that there is no comparison between deaths due to other infectious diseases and HNF. However, HNF is a caused by a new virus and therefore people do not have immunity against it and so some amount of concern is acceptable but the virus is having low virulence .However, winter is a season of […]
