India’s Minamata

Saraju Nisha sits at the door of her house, about 500 metres from a mountain of coal mine waste in Chilika Daad village in Uttar Pradesh’s Sonbhadra district. The 60-year-old former miner is in deep pain.

Face the sun

Science and Technology - Briefs

Health Sciences Assault by medicines

RESIDUE OF A REVOLUTION

Bhola Singh is dead... Bhola Singh was a farmer from village Balloh, district Bhatinda, Punjab. He is part of a story with a beginning and an end. But it has no middle. Thus what follows is a fragment. But it is not fiction.

Now, artificial blood cells

BLOOD shortage in India leaves patients suffering from rare disorders in a lurch. For instance, the Central Blood Bank in Kolkata, needs around 750,000 units of blood per year and the requirement in West Bengal varies from 50,000 to 60,000 units per month. During summer and festivals, the blood bank receives less than 45 per cent of the requirement.

Dipstick

IN 1930, when Karl Landsteiner was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering blood groups, little did he know that a century later the task requiring elaborate lab apparatus could be performed on a stamp-sized paper.

Sanguine approach to circulation

What makes one prone to heart diseases and joint pain in malaria can be understood by applying basic fluid dynamics to blood flow—the same concept works on water pipes.

Confounding clues

With the cracking of the human genome in 2003 emerged the “Omics” era. Genomics and Proteomics turned into fields of study dedicated entirely to genes, proteins and their complex reign over the human body. Terms like “biomarkers” were coined. These are proteins formed in the presence of a disease and are used to predict the disease or determine its progression.

Its always about DNA

A BLOOD test is a convenient way to diagnose diseases. For example, if haemoglobin levels in the red blood cells are low, the person is anaemic. The story, however, does not end with a needle prick. It is a person’s genes that have all the answers. A series of studies has traced genetic markers that control the blood and can also be used to identify various diseases.

Transfusion spoiler

Diabetic donors' blood is not safe for recipient