A study of menstrual hygiene practices and associated environmental & social factors among adolescent girls in rural Puducherry

Introduction. Adolescent females were prevented from receiving the appropriate knowledge due to social restrictions and traditional beliefs, which in turn led to poor hygiene habits. Material and methods. A community-based descriptive cross-sectional study employing a semi-structured questionnaire was carried out in the rural field practice region of MGMCRI, Puducherry, between the 15th of March 2019 and the 31st of April 2021. The study was done in Puducherry. The comprehensive enumeration yielded a total of 528 countable teenage females. Results. The vast majority of the teenage females (89.2%) reported using sanitary pads, whereas just 6.6% and 4.2%, respectively, reported using fresh or reused towels. 65.3% of the girls changed their wet absorbent between two and five times during the day. The vast majority of the girls, or 60.8% of them, disposed of their spent absorbent by either burying it or burning it. 67.9% of the girls were cleansing their genitalia when they were urinating. 54.4% of people cleaned their hands using soap and water, whereas 1.4% utilized ash soil, muddy dirt, or other types of soil. There was a statistically significant correlation between the style of housing and the availability of sanitary latrines (p<0.005) in relation to menstrual hygiene behaviors. Conclusions. This research also highlighted the absence of sanitary toilet facilities in the majority of residences, which negatively impacted the girls' ability to maintain their privacy and led to bad practices around menstruation hygiene

Combination Versus Monotherapy for Carbapenem-Resistant Acinetobacter Species Serious Infections: A Prospective IPTW Adjusted Cohort Study

Introduction: International guidelines recommend definitive combination antibiotic therapy for the management of serious infections involving carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter (CRAB) species. The commonly available combination options include high-dose sulbactam, polymyxins, tetracyclines, and cefiderocol. Scanty prospective data exist to support this approach. Methods: Patients with CRAB bacteraemia, ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), or both were categorized based on whether they received combination therapy or monotherapy. The 30-day mortality was compared between the two groups. Inverse probability treatment weighting (IPTW) was done using propensity score (PS) for a balanced comparison between groups. Results: Between January 2021 and May 2023, of the 161 patients with CRAB bacteraemia (n = 55, 34.2%), VAP (n = 46, 28.6%), or both (n = 60, 37.3%) who received appropriate intravenous antibiotic therapy, 70% (112/161) received monotherapy, and the rest received combination therapy. The overall 30-day mortality was 62% (99/161) and not different (p = 0.76) between the combination therapy (31/49, 63.3%) and monotherapy (68/112, 60.7%) groups. The propensity score matching using IPTW did not show a statistical difference (p = 0.47) in 30-day mortality for receiving combination therapy with an adjusted odds ratio (OR) P of 1.29 (0.64, 2.58). Conclusion: Combination therapy for CRAB infections needs further study in a randomised controlled trial, as this observational study showed no difference in 30-day mortality between monotherapy and combination therapy

BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technology, we present BLOOM, a 176B-parameter open-access language model designed and built thanks to a collaboration of hundreds of researchers. BLOOM is a decoder-only Transformer language model that was trained on the ROOTS corpus, a dataset comprising hundreds of sources in 46 natural and 13 programming languages (59 in total). We find that BLOOM achieves competitive performance on a wide variety of benchmarks, with stronger results after undergoing multitask prompted finetuning. To facilitate future research and applications using LLMs, we publicly release our models and code under the Responsible AI License

C-Reactive Protein - A Promising Marker for Patients with Ischemic Heart Disease along with Covid-19 among South Indian Population

BACKGROUND New corona virus respiratory syndrome is a health emergency due to high infectivity and high case fatality in patients with comorbid conditions like ischemic heart disease. The diagnostic methods of corona virus disease (Covid-19) are still in experimental stage. Hence, a sensitive and specific disease progression marker of Covid-19 is needed. CRP (C-reactive protein) is synthesised by liver. It is elevated in infection and inflammatory conditions as it is an acute phase protein. The purpose of this study was to evaluate CRP as a promising marker for predicting severity of Covid-19 in ischemic heart disease patients and to correlate the impact of CRP with other circulating cardiac biomarkers in different age groups and both sexes. METHODS This is a cross sectional study done among south Indian population mostly from Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. 232 cases were selected and divided into two groups based on age, sex and confirmed Covid-19 positive cases by RT-PCR (Reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction), admitted and treated in Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, Chennai. RESULTS In this study, CRP levels were elevated in the age group of 50 - 70 years (66.96 ± 70.09 mg/dL) than CRP levels of age group 30 - 50 years (82.31 ± 90.23 mg/dL) and P value was found to be significant in the age group of 50 - 70 years. Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) levels were elevated in the age group of 30 - 50 years (380.77 ± 252.23 U/L) than the LDH levels of age group 50 - 70 years (393.53 ± 206.83 U/L) and P value was found to be significant in the age group of 30 - 50 years. Aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and creatine kinase (CK) levels are the additional cardiac enzymes found to be elevated in this study. CRP showed a positive correlation with LDH (r = 0.221 P &lt; 0.001) in both males (r = 0.06 and P &lt; 0.001) and females (r = 0.45 and P &lt; 0.001) with a significant P value. Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves for CRP Vs age group shows a sensitivity of 91.15 % and specificity of 92.52 % and area under curve of 0.556. CONCLUSIONS CRP can be used as a promising marker for early detection and timely intervention of ischemic heart disease in Covid-19 patients especially in the age group of 50 - 70 years and thereby reduces the mortality. KEYWORDS Biomarkers, Heart Disease, Mortality, Prognosis</jats:p