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BACKGROUND: Institutions, government departments, and healthcare professionals engage in social media because it facilitates reaching a large number of people simultaneously. YouTube provides a platform whereby anyone can upload videos and gain feedback on their content from other users. Many YouTube videos are related to health and science, and many people search YouTube for health-related information. YouTube has been acknowledged as a key public information source in recent crises caused by Zika, H1N1, swine flu, and most recently, COVID-19. METHODS: YouTube videos were collected from the YouTube Application Programming Interface (API) using the search terms COVID-19, coronavirus, COVID19, and corona. The search was conducted on April 4 and 5, 2020. The initial investigation found a total of 1084 videos. The second step involved identifying and verifying the videos for their relationship to COVID-19 information and excluding videos that did not relate to COVID-19 or were in a language other than English and Hindi. RESULTS: An analysis of YouTube videos covering COVID-19, uploaded in early 2020, in English and Hindi. The sample comprised 349 videos (n = 334 English). Videos were characterized by contributor, duration, content, and reception (views/likes/dislikes/comments). The majority contained general information, with only 4.01% focusing on symptoms and 11.17% on treatment and outcomes. Further, the majority (n = 229) were short videos of under 10 min duration. Videos provided by government and health care professionals comprised 6.87% and 5.74% % of the sample, respectively. News channels uploaded 71.63% of videos. CONCLUSIONS: YouTube may provide a significant resource for disseminating of information on public health issues like outbreaks of viral infections and should be utilized by healthcare agencies for this purpose. However, there is currently no way to determine whether a video has been produced or verified by authorized healthcare professionals. This limitation needs to be addressed so that the ...

Herbal medicines and traditionally used medicinal plants present an untapped potential for novel molecular target discovery using systems science and OMICS biotechnology driven strategies. Since up to 40% of the world's poor people have no access to government health services, traditional and folk medicines are often the only therapeutics available to them. In this vein, North East (NE) India is recognized for its rich bioresources. As part of the Indo-Burma hotspot, it is regarded as an epicenter of biodiversity for several plants having myriad traditional uses, including medicinal use. However, the improvement of these valuable bioresources through molecular breeding strategies, for example, using genic microsatellites or Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) or Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs)-derived SSRs has not been fully utilized in large scale to date. In this study, we identified a total of 47,700 microsatellites from 109,609 ESTs of 11 medicinal plants (pineapple, papaya, noyontara, bitter orange, bermuda brass, ratalu, barbados nut, mango, mulberry, lotus, and guduchi) having proven antidiabetic properties. A total of 58,159 primer pairs were designed for the non-redundant 8060 SSR-positive ESTs and putative functions were assigned to 4483 unique contigs. Among the identified microsatellites, excluding mononucleotide repeats, di-/trinucleotides are predominant, among which repeat motifs of AG/CT and AAG/CTT were most abundant. Similarity search of SSR containing ESTs and antidiabetic gene sequences revealed 11 microsatellites linked to antidiabetic genes in five plants. GO term enrichment analysis revealed a total of 80 enriched GO terms widely distributed in 53 biological processes, 17 molecular functions, and 10 cellular components associated with the 11 markers. The present study therefore provides concrete insights into the frequency and distribution of SSRs in important medicinal resources. The microsatellite markers reported here markedly add to the genetic stock for cross transferability in these plants ...

Background of the study:Persons with mental illness (PwMI) are prone to weight gain as a side effect of antipsychotics. Health counselling on diet, physical activity, medication adherence, expressed emotions and technology use, by health professionals, can help in managing these side-effects.Aim:The aim of this study was to identify the pre-counselling profile of the subjects such as body mass index (BMI), diet, physical activity, medication adherence, expressed emotions and technology use among PwMI; to attend the Holistic Health Clinic as part of follow-up services in the psychiatry Outpatient Department (OPD) as well as to find correlation and association between the study variables.Methods:The study involved a cross-sectional descriptive design based on convenience sampling. The sample consists of 56 patients who are receiving antipsychotics under symptom control (self-reported) and were overweight. Data were collected with a patient assessment proforma and analysed using SPSS-22.Results:The patients referred to the holistic health counselling (HHC) had abnormal weight and BMI. The mean and SD of weight was 74.48 ± 14.07 and BMI 29.51 ± 5.15. All the participants received counselling on diet, 87.5% on physical activity, 62.5% on sleep hygiene, 55.4% on medication adherence, 8.9% on family emotional climate and only 5.4% on healthy use of technology. Weight has shown significant relation with gender (male = 80.84 ± 17.71, female = 71.09 ± 10.52, t = −2.52, p = .015) and near to significant relationship (χ2 = 7.685, p = .053) with educational status.Conclusion:Patients receiving second-generation antipsychotics (SGA) have lesser extra pyramidal side-effects; however, they are more prone to gain weight. Proper screening and counselling during the follow-up visit in the outpatient setting can help in identification, prevention and management of the obesity-related metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease (CVD), and motivate them to adopt healthy behaviours.

Tungsten metal powder, using a hydrometallurgical route, was extracted from tungsten heavy alloy scrap that was generated during machining of penetrator cores for the manufacture of Fin Stabilised Armour Piercing Discarding Sabot (FSAPDS). The powder was subjected to extensive characterisation that included physical property evaluation and analysis of the alloy chemistry in order to assess its suitability for the preparation of tungsten heavy alloys with enhanced mechanical properties. Subsequently, a tungsten heavy alloy based on W-Ni-Co was consolidated using this powder through liquid phase sintering followed by heat treatment and swaging operations to realize long rods (~500 mm). This was followed by a detailed characterisation that included microstructure and mechanical property. The mechanical properties of these rods are promising, exhibiting a good balance of tensile and impact properties, which in turn underscores the potential of these recycled powders in the production of premium quality heavy alloy long rods for stringent applications such as kinetic energy penetrators.