Living knowledge of the healing plants: Ethno-phytotherapy in the Chepang communities from the Mid-Hills of Nepal

Contribution of indigenous knowledge in developing more effective drugs with minimum or no side effects helped to realise importance of study of indigenous remedies and the conservation of biological resources. This study analysed indigenous knowledge regarding medicinal plants use among the Chepang communities from ward number 3 and 4 of Shaktikhor Village Development Committee located in the central mid hills of Nepal. Data were collected in a one-year period and included interviews with traditional healers and elders. Chepangs are rich in knowledge regarding use of different plants and were using a total 219 plant parts from 115 species including one mushroom (belonging 55 families) for medicinal uses. Out of these, 75 species had 118 different new medicinal uses and 18 of them were not reported in any previous documents from Nepal as medicinal plants. Spiritual belief, economy and limitation of alternative health facilities were cause of continuity of people's dependency on traditional healers. Change in socio-economic activities not only threatened traditional knowledge but also resource base of the area. Enforcement of local institution in management of forest resources and legitimating traditional knowledge and practices could help to preserve indigenous knowledge

Addressing the Needs of Nepalese Migrant Workers in Nepal and in Delhi, India

International labor migration is an increasingly important livelihood strategy in Nepal. There is little documentation of the movements of migrant workers or of their remittances. It is estimated that Nepalese migrants send remittances equivalent to about one quarter of Nepal's gross national product. Migrants and their families lack information about safe migration procedures, host countries, their rights as migrants, and awareness about HIV/AIDS. The present article examines two projects that address these migrants’ needs in their home country and in one destination. The first project is a Nepal-wide radio program based in Kathmandu that provides information on migration issues. The second is a community outreach project based in Delhi, India, focusing on education of migrants

Contemporary childbirth practices in Nepal: improving outcomes

Nepal has one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the world, second only to parts of Africa. Using in-depth interviews, fifteen postpartum mothers and eight mothers-in- law were interviewed to examine current cultural, social and contextual birthing process in Nepal. Analysis of this qualitative data through a grounded theory approach identified the dichotomy between 'traditional birthing' and modern medical obstetric care. This dichotomy limits technical, social and cultural collaborative birthing practices between the many traditional birthing attendants and medical staff. The emerging themes suggest other approaches for childbirth care; bringing harmony to traditional as well as modern clinical approaches. The outcomes of this study hope to enfranchise women with safer and more acceptable birthing experiences and outcomes not only in Nepal but also in other developing countries

Automated quality control of small animal MR neuroimaging data

MRI is a valuable tool for studying brain structure and function in animal and clinical studies. With the growth of public MRI repositories, access to data has finally become easier. However, filtering large data sets for potential poor-quality outliers can be a challenge. We present AIDAqc, a machine learning-assisted automated Python-based command-line tool for small animal MRI quality assessment. Quality control features include signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), temporal SNR, and motion. All features are automatically calculated and no regions of interest are needed. Automated outlier detection for a given dataset combines the interquartile range and the machine learning methods one-class support vector machine, isolation forest, local outlier factor, and elliptic envelope. To evaluate the reliability of individual quality control metrics, a simulation of noise (Gaussian, salt and pepper, speckle) and motion was performed. In outlier detection, single scans with induced artifacts were successfully identified by AIDAqc. AIDAqc was challenged in a large heterogeneous dataset collected from 19 international laboratories, including data from mice, rats, rabbits, hamsters, and gerbils, obtained with different hardware and at different field strengths. The results show that the manual inter-rater agreement (mean Fleiss Kappa score 0.17) is low when identifying poor-quality data. A direct comparison of AIDAqc results, therefore, showed only low to moderate concordance. In a manual post-hoc validation of AIDAqc output, precision was high (>70%). The outlier data can have a significant impact on further post-processing, as shown in representative functional and structural connectivity analysis. In summary, this pipeline optimized for small animal MRI provides researchers with a valuable tool to efficiently and effectively assess the quality of their MRI data, which is essential for improved reliability and reproducibility