Monthly Archives: May 2012

Big cat blues

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Large banners featuring tigers and leopards have come up in and around India’s national capital region of New Delhi. The banners, featuring Asia’s big cats —  tigers, leopards, snow leopards and clouded leopards  — threatened by illegal poaching, are part of an eye-catching campaign by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The black and white pictures have a direct-hitting subtext “Wanted Alive” emphasising the need to keep these felines healthy and happy in their natural habitat. Reproduced here, with permission from WWF, are the pictures that tell their own story.

Telling pictures{credit}WWF{/credit}

The threat on Asia’s big cat was highlighted at the recently concluded Global Tiger Recovery Programme Stocktaking meeting in New Delhi from 15-17 May, 2012. The meeting was attended by senior government officials from all 13 tiger range countries.

The meet also discussed how, besides existing markets, emerging ones such as  Myanmar, were compounding the threat on these animals killed for their body parts. The body parts are smuggled through porous borders to clandestine international markets.

{credit}WWF{/credit}

According to TRAFFIC, the WWF-IUCN wildlife trade monitoring network ,  the snow leopard from the Himalayan mountains and the little known clouded leopard from the dense jungles of north-eastern India are hunted for their beautiful coat. The beautiful clouded leopard’s bones are smuggled for medicines, its meat for exotic dishes and the live animal itself for pet trade. Its canines and claws are also used for decorative purposes.

{credit}WWF{/credit}

The tiger, of course,  remains the largest cat species in the world threatened by illegal trade in its bones
and skin. The bones are valued in traditional East Asian medicines, and the skin is used by the wealthy to decorate houses, tents or clothes. TRAFFIC estimates that body parts of nearly 500 tigers have been recovered from illegal traders in India during 2000-2011. Many more tigers may have been killed and smuggled out, undetected.

Leopards are also being poached in large numbers in India for their skin and body parts.

{credit}WWF{/credit}

The campaign comes after a similar innovative one on wildlife in September 2010 when India was gearing up to host the Commonwealth games.  In that campaign, TRAFFIC warned tourists of the dire consequences of buying illegal wildlife souvenirs from India.

Here’s wishing this new campaign makes people sit up and take note.

 

Encephalitis meet

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A regular press release from the U.S. Embassy got me back to the issue of bugs. This time to mosquito-borne Japanese Encephalitis which is crippling over 5000 people, mostly children, in India every year and killing close to 700.

{credit}Jim Peacock/Photodisc/Macmillan Mexico{/credit}

Like their counterparts in many Asian countries, Japanese encephalitis has become a pain in the neck for public health administrators in India. Despite the introduction of a vaccination programme about six years back, many states (worst hit Assam, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) continue to experience large seasonal outbreaks. One such case in point is eastern Uttar Pradesh which experiences outbreaks every rainy season. And funnily enough, the reason behind these outbreaks are still a mystery.

What should be the public health surveillance priorities for India? Which way should research in this area be steered to stop these seasonal outbreaks? What exactly is triggering these outbreaks? These questions will be on top of the agenda for more than 80 international experts getting together in Lucknow, the capital city of Uttar Pradesh, today. The occasion — a three-day workshop on acute encephalitis at the Sanjay Gandhi Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences co-sponsored by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s National Center for Disease Control (NCDC), Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Vector Borne Disease Control Program (NVBDCP).

NVBDCP’s surveillance and control of JE monitors the vaccination and vector control programme, which has been lauded in the past for achieving a significant drop in the number of JE afflicted. Most of the research on the viral causes of JE is spearheaded by the National Institute of Virology of ICMR. The Indian government also has an Acute Encephalitis Task Force, comprising members of different governmental programmes that work specifically on encephalitis.

The meeting at Lucknow is expected to establish new research protocols including a sentinel site surveillance platform to determine the primary causes of the recurring outbreaks. There’s also talk of a collaboration between CDC and the Indian government to reduce the spread of acute encephalitis in India.

Let’s hope scientists and policy makers can get together to prevent these outbreaks and tackle JE with the same enthusiasm as polio.

Alzheimer’s rage

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It’s nice to be hear from diaspora Indian scientists about the wonderful work they have been doing in foreign labs. Nature India features some such exceptional work in its news and features section once a while.

Itender Singh{credit}URMC{/credit}

This week we heard from Itender Singh, a Delhi University alumnus and presently a research assistant professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center in USA. His work with colleagues from the centre  and elsewhere has resulted in development of a new compound that promises to work wonders for people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Their success story (and paper published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation) is already getting a lot of peer attention[1], [2], [3].

Singh and colleagues have created a new compound that acts to inhibit the functioning of another compound called RAGE, which is known to play a key role in the accumulation of beta amyloid levels in the brain of people with AD. Such accumulation of beta amyloids is known to be the the main trigger for neuronal loss and dementia. So, in essence, the researchers have found a compound that cuts out the nuisance value of RAGE.

Earlier therapies to reduce the production or aggregation of beta amyloids have not worked out to be effective. Singh and colleagues have created a novel ‘small-molecule inhibitor’ which works in this manner — it blocks the functioning of RAGE (acronym for ‘Receptor for Advanced Glycation End products’) thus helping reverse the beta amyloid levels in the brain.

Their work on aged mice has shown that this small molecule inhibitor can normalize cognitive performance. This looks like one of the most promising anti-RAGE therapies till date.

Though the scientists warn that it’s still a long way to go when people with AD can actually reap the benefits of their research, we hope the therapy gets through the necessary trials soon and leaps from the bench to the bedside at the earliest to provide relief to the suffering elderly.

No shadow day

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Now this one is quite interesting, as most news from the planetarium is.

Did you know that there are certain days in the year when you won’t cast a shadow of yourself even if you are standing in the scorching sun? This happens — though just for a while — on certain days when the sun is absolutely, directly and truly on top of your head. And in India we are experiencing that time of the year when your shadow will leave you briefly, as if it has just disappeared.

Here’s a picture borrowed from Arvind Paranjpye, Director of the Nehru Planetarium in Mumbai, to explain what happens.

Though the handle of this torch casts a shadow on the torch, the torch itself casts no shadow. Paranjpye, like many of his colleagues, has been holding public demonstrations for a number of years now to popularise the simple science behind the event.

The phenomenon is experienced twice every year by people living between the latitudes 23.5 deg. south (tropic of Capricorn) and 23.5 deg. north (tropic of Cancer). Standing vertically in the sun during these days at certain given times will make your shadow vanish completely. Here are the timings and dates for some Indian cities that are experiencing the magical phenomenon right now.

It’s interestingly called the ‘Zero Shadow Day’ and is certainly a phenomenon worth experiencing. If not for anything else then to prove the saying “Your shadow never leaves you” wrong!

Double collision theory

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This week  a new theory has been proposed on how India and Asia collided, geographically speaking, in the ‘Cenozoic’ era. It suggests that the collision happened in two stages — one about 50 million years ago and the other about 25-20 million years ago to give a final shape to the present day continent.

The continents as we know them today. Ian Faulkner/Photodisc/Macmillan Australia

Earlier research has estimated the time of this collision and shown that the convergence between Indian and Asian plates produced the ‘archetypical continental collision zone’ comprising the Himalaya mountain belt and the Tibetan Plateau. But how and where was the India–Asia convergence got accommodated after the collision remains a long-standing controversy. The two plates have converged up to around 3,600 km, yet the shortening of the upper crusts of Asia and Himalaya as documented in geological records shows this to be approximately 2,350-km less.

Fresh evidence has now emerged to suggest that that this discrepancy can be explained by ‘subduction of highly extended continental and oceanic Indian lithosphere’ within the Himalaya around that time — 50 and 25 million years ago.

Using paleomagnetic data, researchers have shown that this continental and oceanic “Greater India” resulted from around 2,675 km of North–South extension, accommodated between the Tibetan Himalaya and cratonic India. This happened between 120 and 70 million years ago.

The researchers suggest that approximately 50 million years ago  the India–Asia collision was actually a collision of the Tibetan-Himalayan microcontinent with Asia, followed by subduction of the largely oceanic Greater India Basin. According to them, the “hard” India–Asia collision occurred around 25–20 million years ago. This happened alongside deformation in central Asia and rapid exhumation of Greater Himalaya crystalline rocks. All this could have a link with intensification of the Asian monsoon system, the researchers say.

Seismic tomography also reflects this two-stage collision between India and Asia.

Here’s adding a fresh angle to the ever-evolving theory of the India-Asia collision!