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The objective of this study was to understand the roles, responsibilities, and challenges faced by caregivers of dementia patients. Data was collected through telephonic interviews with a sample of ten family caregivers located in three different cities in India. Professional caregivers were excluded from the sample. Excerpts of the interviews were analyzed by using thematic analysis. Caregivers' responses were studied in detail multiple times to generate initial codes from textual data. Eight themes depicting the role of caregivers were identified Themes that emerged include babysitting and 24-hour nursing care, ensuring patient safety, convincing and consoling the patient, regulating emotions, managing time and household work, financial planning and management, multi-tasking, and balancing, pre-planning, organizing and observing etc. The interpretive paradigm helped in developing an in-depth understanding of the caregiver s perceptions and lived experiences. The research has some obvious limitations associated with a qualitative framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global explosion of the COVID-19 pandemic has created worldwide unprecedented health and economic challenges which stimulated one of the biggest annual migrations globally. In the Indian context, even after proactive decisions taken by the Government, the continual growth of COVID-19 raises questions regarding its extent and severity. The present work utilizes the susceptible-infected-recovered-death (SIRD) compartment model for parameter estimation and fruitful prediction of COVID-19. Further, various optimization techniques such as particle swarm optimization (PSO), gradient (G), pattern search (PS) and their hybrid are employed to solve the considered model. The simulation study endorse the efficiency of PSO (with or without G) and G+PS+G over other techniques for ongoing pandemic assessment. The key parametric values including characteristic time of infection and death and reproduction number have been estimated as 60 days, 67 days and 4.78 respectively by utilizing the optimum results. The model assessed that India has passed its peak duration of COVID-19 with more than 81% recovery and only a 1.59% death rate. The short duration analysis (15 days) of obtained results against reported data validates the effectiveness of the developed models for ongoing pandemic assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In majority of snakebite cases, the snake responsible for the bite remains unidentified. The traditional snakebite diagnostics method relies upon clinical symptoms and blood coagulation assays that do not provide accurate diagnosis which is important for epidemiological as well as diagnostics point of view. On the other hand, high batch-to-batch variations in antibody performance limit its application for diagnostic assays. In recent years, nucleic acid aptamers have emerged as a strong chemical rival of antibodies due to several obvious advantages, including but not limited to in vitro generation, synthetic nature, ease of functionalization, high stability and adaptability to various diagnostic formats. In the current study, we have rationally truncated an aptamer developed for α-Toxin of Bungarus multicinctus and demonstrated its utility for the detection of venom of Bungarus caeruleus. The truncated aptamer α-Tox-T2 (26mer) is found to have greater affinity than its 40-mer parent counterpart α-Tox-FL. The truncated aptamers are characterized and compared with parent aptamer for their binding, selectivity, affinity, alteration in secondary structure and limit of detection. Altogether, our findings establish the cross-species application of a DNA aptamer generated for α-Toxin of Bungarus multicinctus (a snake found in Taiwan and China) for the reliable detection of venom of Bungarus caeruleus (a snake found in the Indian subcontinent).