Global companies to work for eradication of kala-azar in Bihar

Three international agencies, including the US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, will work for the elimination of kala-azar, a deadly disease caused by a parasite transmitted by the tiny sand fly, in Bihar. C.P. Thakur, a former Central minister and chairman of the Kala-Azar Task Force in Bihar, said on Wednesday that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the California-based Institute for One World Health and Switzerland-based Medecins Sans Frontiers would work for the elimination of kala-azar in Bihar.
The agencies will launch mass awareness campaigns and provide latest medicines and treatment for those suffering from the disease. "All three international agencies will start their projects soon to check, control and eradicate kala-azar," Thakur said. He said that the agencies had decided to focus on the flood-prone districts of north Bihar, which are the most affected by the disease.
The Gates Foundation and One World Health will jointly work in the districts of East Champaran, Muzaffarpur, Samastipur and Darbhanga. Medecins Sans Frontiers will work alone in Vaishali district. The Gates Foundation’s senior programme officer Thomas P. Kanyok and One World Health programme director Helen Matzger led a delegation of experts from the agencies who met chief minister Nitish Kumar recently and informed him about their keenness to work in the state. "Nitish Kumar assured all possible help to them," sources in the chief minister’s office said. Thakur said over 100,000 people, mostly the poor, are suffering from the disease and hundreds have already died in the last one year. Currently, 31 of the 38 districts in Bihar are in the grip of the disease.
The sand fly that transmits the disease multiplies in the cow dung which villagers use liberally to plaster their shanties or as cow dung cakes for fuel. The disease is characterised by fever, weight loss, swelling of the spleen and liver and leads to cardiovascular complications resulting in death.
Early this year, the Bihar government set up the task force on kala-azar headed by Thakur to suggest measures to eradicate the disease by 2010. Thakur said that continued spraying of insecticides for at least five years in a phased manner and supervised administration of Amphotericin B could eliminate the disease. "Dengue deaths in Delhi has become a national issue but deaths due to kala-azar in rural Bihar hardly make any news," he lamented. Experts say poor living standards and unhygienic conditions make members of the Mushahar community of Dalits an easy prey to the disease.
Kala-azar, medically known as Visceral Leishmaniasis, is also known as the poor man’s disease because it affects the poorest of the poor. Bihar last faced a kala-azar epidemic in 1991 when 250,000 cases were reported. In 2000, the numbers were low but started rising from 2003.


Vitamin D can help you live a long life


Vitamin D, which the body gets from some foods and sunlight, could help people live longer, latest research has found. Vitamin D is found in animal fats such as butter, eggs, liver, oily fish (kippers, mackerel, sardines and tuna), margarine, full-fat dairy products and evaporated or malted milk. Sunshine is also a significant source of Vitamin D.
Vitamin D deficiency is known to cause several health disorders. It can also increase the risk of cancer. The new review analysed the results of 18 Vitamin D studies on 57,000 adults in the US, Britain and Europe that included mortality rates and found that people who took Vitamin D supplements daily had significant health benefits, reported the health portal WebMD.
Most of the participants were frail elders with low blood levels of the vitamin. Participants were typically assigned to take vitamin D supplements or a placebo containing no vitamin D. Each study was designed differently, but on average, participants were followed for 5.7 years. During that time, 4,777 participants died of any cause. People taking vitamin D were seven per cent less likely to die during the studies. The precise reason for their lower death rate isn’t clear, and the reviewers aren’t recommending a specific vitamin D dose. The new review, published in the archives of Internal Medicine, comes at a time when vitamin D is a hot topic linked to benefits including lower risk of some cancers and fewer falls for elders.


HIV on increase among gays in New York


HIV is staging a comeback among young gay men in New York, with new cases increasing by a third in those younger than 30 and doubling among teens in the past six years, health officials said.
In 2001, there were 374 new HIV diagnoses among gay men younger than 30; last year, there were 499, a city report said. In gay males ages 13 to 19, cases increased from 41 six years ago to 87 last year. Although those numbers pale next to the thousands stricken in the 1980s and 90s, they reflect the virus’ obstinacy in the gay community, health commissioner Thomas Frieden said.
HIV transmission no longer occurs through blood transfusions, is down among IV drug users and is rarely passed from pregnant women to their babies, he noted. "A generation of men is growing up having not seen their friends die of AIDS, and maybe having the impression that HIV is not such a terrible infection, " Frieden said. Unless they practice safer sex, he said, "We will face another wave of suffering and death from HIV and AIDS."
Gay black and hispanic youth are most profoundly affected by the growing number of infections, with 81 of 87 new cases last year occurring in those groups. At one teen clinic in the Bronx, the number of new patients doubled in the first half of this year, said Dr Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS programme at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore. Although that may be because of more routine HIV testing, "It’s a shock and absolutely a horror story that the rates continue to go up," Futterman said.
Minority-group teens may feel they have to hide their sexual orientation, she said. At the same time, they may not relate to the gay community.
"The pressure of covering up means you put yourself in riskier situations than if you could go on a date and ask out who you like," Futterman said. New York is the epicenter of the country’s AIDS epidemic, with more than 100,000 people here living with the disease and nearly as many as 92,000 having died of AIDS. The city has been recording AIDS cases since 1981 but HIV cases only since 2000.