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)