Quality of Life Vs Good Life

Quality of life is your personal satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) with the cultural or intellectual conditions under which you live (as distinct from material comfort);

while "The good life is more than a yearning for the good, the beautiful, the true. It includes decision, will, determination, and effort, individually and collectively, to be clear regarding the theory as well as successful in practice...aiming at the integration of thought, the word and deed which is the expression of wisdom and the basis of serenity and inner peace."

-Scott Nearing, Man’s Search for the Good Life

Global threat: 60% of deaths caused by chronic diseases

New Delhi: Three out of every five deaths in 2008 were caused by non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cancer,stroke,diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.Whats worse,deaths caused by these diseases are expected to increase by 15% in the next decade from 36 million in 2008 to 44 million in 2020.In 2030,it will cross the 50 million mark.
The region projected to have the greatest total number of NCD deaths in 2020 is South-East Asia 10.4 million deaths.These stats are bound to bother India since 80% of these deaths occurred and will occur in low and middle income countries,according to the first global status report on NCDs launched on Wednesday by the World Health Organization.
Calling it an impending disaster for many countries a disaster for health,for society and national economies,WHO director general Dr Margaret Chan said Chronic NCDs deliver a two-punch blow to development.They cause billions of dollars in losses of national income,and they push millions of people below the poverty line,each and every year.

Chewing tobacco sends heart pounding
NEW DELHI: You thought that puffing away on cigarettes only could result in a racy heart?
A new research by doctors from India's premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences has found that even chewing tobacco - as less as one gram - significantly raised heart rate.What was most significant among the findings was that when doctors asked patients with normal coronary arteries to chew tobacco in the catheterization laboratory, a striking transient narrowing of normal coronary arteries were visible even with the slightest chewing tobacco.

India's malaria figures grossly underestimated?

NEW DELHI: India's malaria figures till now seem to have been highly underestimated.
Under the country's National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP), malaria was believed to have infected 1.53 million and killed just over 1,100 in 2009. However, World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated over 15,000 deaths.
Fresh estimates worked out by experts from WHO, Union health ministry and NVBDCP — based on a new methodology — says the number of deaths is more than double of what WHO had earlier estimated.

Doctors are busy in developing countries

Doctors in developing nations spend less than 60 sec to prescribe medicine: WHO
Kounteya Sinha, TNN | Apr 23, 2011, 03.58am IST
NEW DELHI: On an average, doctors in developing countries spend less than 60 seconds in prescribing medicines and explaining the regimen to their patients, according to World Health Organization's (WHO) World Medicines Situation 2011 that was released on Friday.

As a result, only half of patients receive any advice on how to take their medicines and about one third of them don't know how to take their medicines immediately on leaving the facility.

News Digest

Medical errors in top 10 killers: WHO
MUMBAI: Medicine heals, but this fact doesn`t hold true for every 300th patient admitted to hospital. Call it the law of averages or blame human error for it, but the World Health Organization believes that one in 10 hospital admissions leads to an adverse event and one in 300 admissions in death.

Indian doc's book on cancer wins Pulitzer Prize
BOSTON: Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee's acclaimed book on cancer, 'The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,' has won the prestigious 2011 Pulitzer prize in the general non-fiction category.

Free generic medicines for AIIMS OPD patients
NEW DELHI: There is good news for the over 5,000 patients visiting AllMS OPD everyday. Now, they will get free medicines from the hospital. The Governing Body and the Institute Body of the premier institute have approved the plan for setting up a pharmacy which will have all 'essential medicines'. According to a senior official, the modality for procurement and distribution of the medicines is being finalized and the new system is likely to be put in place soon.

Research guides as library instruction tools
The study presents practical ways in which online research guides can serve as library instruction tools.

Ground rules of Team

mutual respect and cooperation
clear and positive communication
regular feedback about performance
feeling of appreciation for contribution
clarity of structure and goals

Strategic Planning

It is the process of carrying out a plan in a skillful way.
Planning for results keeping in mind the (a) goals : defining the desired future and directions (b)objectives: specific and measurable levels (c) action steps : activities to be taken.
But success of the plan is possible only when people, both as individuals and as organizations, work together for a common goal.

New realities confronting the global health research community

Widening disparities
Globalization
Continuing pandemics
Knowledge of recent development
ICT's

LAMP: a source of vision

Research,training, capacity building,partnership building and networking, including leadership development (management competencies) must for improving efficiency and quality in health care that is what a lamp is designed for.

Quality is never an accident;

It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.By William A. Foster

Electronic publishing or ePublishing includes the digital publication of e-books and electronic articles, and the development of digital libraries and catalogues. Electronic publishing has become common in scientific publishing where it has been argued that peer-reviewed scientific journals are in the process of being replaced by electronic publishing. Although distribution via the Internet (also known as online publishing or web publishing when in the form of a website) is nowadays strongly associated with electronic publishing, there are many non network electronic publications such as Encyclopedias on CD and DVD, as well as technical and reference publications relied on by mobile users and others without reliable and high speed access to a network.

involves
Ideas, Experiments, Data gathering, Conclusions

Require:
· Semantic tagging of PDFs and beyond
· Citation ontologies
· Scholarly html – to write these workflows
· Authoring tools

Librarians: Masters of the info universe By Kerith Page McFadden, CNN
Librarians, information specialists, knowledge managers or whatever title a librarian might have -- their skills are in high demand. And, though you might not know it, they are everywhere.

Development of MEDLARS

NLM's indexing tradition began with Dr. John Shaw Billings, the first director of the Library of the Office of the Surgeon General of the US Army 1867–1895 (later named the National Library of Medicine).

Read More :The development of the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System (MEDLARS)

World Health Day 2011

World Health Day is celebrated every year to mark the establishment of WHO on April 7th 1948.On this day and throughout the year the Organization selects a key global health issue and organizes international, regional and local events to highlight the selected area.This time theme chosen is on 'Antimicrobial resistance and its global spread'.

Read more:World Health Day

Final census figures to be released in 2012

Overall, there has been a decline in the number of children under the age of 6, down 5 million since 2001 to 158.8 million in 2011. During this time, India's population has increased by more than 181 million. The proportion of children between 0 and 6 to total population is indicative of a fall or rise in fertility.

The figures presented on Thursday are preliminary and the final population count will be released next year.

Some projections way off the mark

NEW DELHI: The provisional population data from census 2011 might not contain any dramatic surprises as the figures are more or less in sync with perceived notions. But, some of the numbers are significantly different from projections made a decade ago by the office of the registrar-general and census commissioner about what the picture would be come 2011.

The overall population of the country grew a little bit more than what experts had expected as the population became 1.21 billion while the predicted figure was 1.20 billion. But that's just a minor difference.

News Digest

Population rise slows, literacy grows,
NEW DELHI: At 1.21 billion, India`s population is almost equal to the combined population of USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Japan. This also means India has added another Brazil to its population in the last 10 years despite population growth slowing down. Mainland China`s population is 1.35 billion.

Census 2011`s provisional data, released on Thursday, affirms the India growth story — population growth slowing down and the number of literates growing, especially female literates

Census sounds alarm
NEW DELHI: The showpiece of a resurgent India, Delhi, is also steeped in a mediaeval mindset. The provisional Census data released on Thursday shows that the child sex ratio for the age group of 0 to 6 years has marginally declined from 868 girls per 1000 boys in 2001 to 866 girls per 1000 boys in 2011.

MCI to crack down on doc-firm nexus
NEW DELHI: Pharmaceutical companies may soon be officially allowed to sponsor medical conferences. However, they cannot pay the expenses of individual doctors — like travel, room and board — for conferences.

Also, the money that companies would pay for the event has to be given directly to the conference secretariat.

Northeast district: Most densely populated, poor infra
NEW DELHI: It's a small Delhi district but has a population density more than thrice that of the capital. Consequently, Northeast Delhi is also the most densely populated district in the country.

Northeast Delhi came into existence in 1997 as a revenue district. The latest census has pegged its population density at 37,346 per sq km as against 11,297 per sq km of the capital itself. It comprises of areas like Shahdara, Sadatput, Sonia Vihar, New Usmanpur, Wecome, Seelampur, Mandoli, Nand Nagri, Zafrabad, Mustafabad, Maujpur, Khajuri Khaas, Dilshad Garden and Seemapuri.

Welcome slowdown: Foot off the population accelerator
NEW DELHI: For the first time since Independence, India added fewer people to its population in the decade just ended than in the previous one. While decadal population growth rates have consistently been declining since the 1960s, the absolute addition in each decade was always higher than in the previous decade. That has now changed.

India added 181 million people to its population between 2001 and 2011 against 182 million in the preceding decade. However, even 181 million equals the total population of Brazil, the world's fifth most populous country.

Ovid MEDLINE®
The premier, comprehensive biomedical database from one of the leading sources of medical
and healthcare and available on OvidSP.
Source: U.S. National Library of Medicine
Updated daily, MEDLINE on OvidSP offers you seamless and up-to-the-minute access to the latest
bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 3,900 biomedical journals published in more than
70 countries. Astracts are included more than 75% of the records.
The full MEDLINE product on OvidSP includes:
- Access to Ovid MEDLINE In-Process & Other Non-Indexed Citations, which is Ovid's collection of
non-indexed NLM records, both the in-process records as well as PubMed records not in MEDLINE.
- Access to OLDMEDLINE: the National Library of Medicine's online database of approximately 1,700,000
citations to articles from international biomedical journals covering the fields of medicine, preclinical sciences
and allied health sciences from 1948 through 1965.
- Subject limits based on PubMed's subject subsets. The addition of these subsets allows users to easily
restrict a broad search to their specific area of interest: AIDS, Bioethics, Cancer, Complementary Medicine,
History of Medicine, Space Life Sciences, Systematic Reviews, Toxicology.