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Peste des petits ruminants (PPR) presents economic challenges in enzootic countries impacting small ruminant productivity. The state of Karnataka, India, implemented a mass vaccination campaign in alignment with the PPR-Global Eradication Programme (GEP) and the National Strategic Plan for PPR eradication. This study was conducted from January to March 2023 to assess seroconversion in post-vaccinated goats and sheep at the epidemiological unit (epi-unit) level, aligning with the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) guidelines in the PPR Global Control and Eradication Strategy (GCES). Before vaccination, 3466 random serum samples were collected from small ruminants of three age groups (6–12 months, 1–2 years, and >2 years) across 116 epi-units, spanning 82 taluks in 28 districts. Post-vaccination sero-monitoring included 1102 serum samples collected from small ruminants of the 6–12-month age group only, across 111 epi-units covering 64 taluks in 23 districts. The PPRV antibody status was determined using an indigenous hemagglutinin (H) protein monoclonal antibody-based competitive ELISA kit. Pre-vaccination, the PPR seropositivity rates were 55%, 62%, and 66% in the age groups of 6–12 months, 1–2 years, and >2 years, respectively, with a 61% PPRV antibody prevalence across all the age groups. Notably, 41% of the epi-units exhibited antibody prevalence rates of ≥70%, indicating a substantial population immunity, possibly attributed to the previous vaccination program in the state since 2011. In contrast, only 17% of the epi-units had below 30% seroprevalence rates, emphasizing the need for intensified vaccination. Statistical analysis of the data revealed significant correlations (p < 0.05) between the presence of PPRV antibodies and host factors such as species, breed, and sex. Post-vaccination seroprevalence in the 6–12 months age group was found to be 73.4%, indicating the use of an efficacious vaccine. On the evaluation of vaccination immunity in the 6–12 months age group, it was revealed that over 69% of the epi-units achieved a response surpassing ≥70%, indicating a significant improvement from 42% of the epi-units in pre-vaccination. For active PPR eradication, a mass vaccination campaign (>95% coverage) targeting small ruminant populations aged >4 months is advocated, aiming to achieve the desired herd immunity of >80%. This study offers crucial insights into PPR baseline seroprevalence/immunity status and vaccine efficacy, guiding national strategies towards a PPR-free India and further supporting the global eradication initiative.

The presence of heavy metal in the environment has been increasing with the increasing anthropogenic activities. The following study observes the bioaccumulation activities of Solanumlycopersicum, Eiseniafetida and a combined set-up containing both. The metals used for the particular study includes lead, mercury, chromium and cadmium. It was observed that each heavy metal has a particular pattern of accumulation as well as this pattern being affected when in the combined set up containing both Solanumlycopersicum and Eiseniafetida. In the end the combined set up was more efficient in bioaccumulating heavy metals from the contaminated soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Addition of clonidine to ropivacaine intrathecally has been found to improve quality and duration of sensory and motor blockade alongwith improvement in postoperative analgesia. In our study we compared ropivacaine alone and in combination with different doses of clonidine. Material and Methods: The randomised doubleblind study was conducted on 90 patients aged 20- 65years withASA grade I-III posted for elective anorectal surgeries of duration less than 90 minutes under spinal anaesthesia.Patients were randomly divided into three groupsof 30 each. Group I received (18.75 mg)plain ropivacaine. Group II received 18.75 mg ropivacaine and 50 µg clonidine and Group III received 18.75 mg ropivacaine and 75 µg clonidine. Onset and duration of sensory and motor blockade, haemodynamic changes, postoperative analgesia, sedation score and side effects were compared between the groups. Results: The time of request of first analgesia was longest in group III( 611.33 minutes) which was significantly greater than group II (426.96 minutes) and group I (220 minutes).The difference in the sedation score between group I and group II was statistically non-significant and difference between group I and III and group II and III was highly significant. There was no incidence of delayed micturition in group I, 4(13,33%) in group II and 6(20%) in group III ConclusionAddition of both 50 and 75µg of clonidine to ropivacine significantly prolonged duration of analgesia with lesser number of rescue analgesia and reduced VAS score but there were more incidence of sedation, hypotension and delayed micturition with 75 µg of clonidine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blood‐Brain‐Barrier (BBB) permeability is one of the critical factors in the success and failure of CNS drug development. The most accurate method of measuring BBB permeability involves clinical experiments, which are labour‐intensive and time‐consuming. Thus, numerous efforts were made to use artificial intelligence (AI) to predict molecules′ BBB permeability. Most of the previous models are based on calculated descriptors and molecular fingerprints. In the present work, we have developed an NLP‐based feature extraction technique in Deep‐Learning models to predict BBB permeability. We have used the B3DB database and generated SELFIES to extract features from the molecules. We have employed word level and N‐gram tokenization to represent words into numeric vectors. The extracted features were fed into several Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Bi‐directional Long Short‐Term Memory (LSTM) models. The model, ANN‐10 built using ANN and 6‐gram tokenization, performed best on the independent test set. The accuracy, precision, recall, F1, specificity and AUC of ROC scores were found to be 0.89, 0.91, 0.91, 0.91, 0.85 and 0.90. Thus, the developed model can be used for the early screening of CNS drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byline: Priyanka. Patel, Asha. Anand, Sonia. Parikh, Akash. Patel, Rahul. Kulkarni Burkitt lymphoma is a high-grade B-cell lymphoma with aggressive course of disease and primarily systemic nodal involvement. Primary Burkitt [...]

Byline: Andeep. Kukkar, Harsha. Panchal, Asha. Anand Primary neuroendocrine tumors of the thymus are unusual anterior mediastinal tumors with a variable prognosis. A retrospective analysis of five patients with primary [...]

Byline: Rahul. Kulkarni, Sonia. Parikh, Asha. Anand, Harsha. Panchal, Apurva. Patel, Priti. Trivedi, Kshitij. Joshi, Pushpak. Chirmade Solitary plasmacytoma of the bone (SPB) is a rare plasma cell neoplasm representing [...]