Comparitive evaluation of different systems of medicines and the present scenario of chikungunya in Kerala

Objective:To identify the chikungunya outbreaks in both indoor and outdoor patients in some selected hospitals in our locality and the burden and magnitude of the disease,to compare different system of medicines(allopathic,Ayurvedic,homeopathy etc) and to explore the knowledge,attitude and practices of pharmacists and other health care professionals in the treatment of chikungunya.Methods:A six-month study was carried out.Detailed history was taken from the case history,personal interview of doctors and suspected cases.Personal data such as name age,sex,location,date of onset of illness,medical history,general/systemic examination features,drugs used(allopathy,Ayurveda,homeopathy,or traditional) for the treatment,etc.were noted down.A simple questionnaire was prepared and distributed to various doctors practicing various systems of medicines.Results:A total of 209 suspected cases were identified from July to December,2009.People in the age group of 20-40 years were more affected.The study revealed that females were more affected than males.The Grade-Ⅲ(58.73%) population was more prone to chikungunya than Grade-Ⅱ(38.75%) and Grade-Ⅰ(2.87%).It showed that fever,pain in muscles, and sleeping disturbances were the intense symptoms of chikungunya.Myocarditis and arthritis were concomitant diseases which worsened chikungunya symptoms.It also indicated the effective medicine for compliance is nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs(NSAIDS).Conclusions:From our study we found that in some places there is no proper documentation,even though there are proper guidelines framed by the relevant authorities.It can be concluded from the study that all the systems of medicine are equally important for the management of chikungunya.Additional effort in promoting the guidelines at local level and proper documentation helps to achieve the goal of curbing the chikungunya.It is high time to increase our effort and promote these messages at grassroot level which benefits the society/ community as a whole.

Improved Heat FT Induction Leads to Earlier and More Prolific Flowering in Poplar

Trees have a long juvenile phase before reproductive onset.This makes their breeding and studying floral development difficult.Precocious flowering using FT technology has shown promise.However,transgenic FT overexpression has significant negative pleiotropic effects.Hence,there has been interest in inducible FT expression for flower induction.Previously reported heat inducible expression of FT in poplar successfully induced flowering.However,flowering was sporadic and took up to 6 weeks.Here we report improvements in the protocol,which led to faster and more prolific flowering.Specifically,we increased the once to three times daily heat treatment.The repeated heat inductive treatments led to nearly five times higher FT expression,compared to the single daily treatment.The highly increased FT expression led to significant acceleration and abundance of flowering.