A Success Story : ABBAS JUMANNE Family

The Mandarin may be small but it is having a big impact on Tanzanian families. Yesterday I received this report from our friends at Floresta regarding a family who have had one of our lights for a year.

Introduction

Abbas Jumanne Abbas family joined Floresta VICOBA group since 2007 at Matala, Matala is a village in Kilimanjaro region, Moshi rural district and the family has 8 members. Four (4) kids are studying in Primary schools and one (1) kid is in secondary school. Before the introduction of solar lights in March 2010, we were using a lamp that uses kerosene and lanterns for lighting during studying during the evening or at night and cooking time. Our main activities are crops production and livestock rearing in small scale production.

The distribution of solar lights by Floresta Tanzania has changed our lives since March 2010 as described in several aspects below;

Education

Solar lights brought studying harmony to kids in accomplishing their home works as observed after introduction of this simple light, It is simple in handling and no harmful effect like injury, When kids woke up during the night, they simply switch on solar light as compared to kerosene lamps of which most of them fail to light it and ask their parents to help them which seems like a disturbance to them, Kids tend to study at night two days in a week due to unavailability of kerosene and the problem has been solved by Floresta and they are now studying everyday to accomplish their home work. Kids have raised their capacity by studying effectively during the evening and night. Example my child who is studying secondary has raised from top 20 up to the position of top 10 students in the class, this is due to the use of solar light that has little disturbances.

Health

By observation our children had a problem of eyes irritation when using kerosene lamps and lanterns for studying, probably this contributed to lower their capacity in studying, and also Kerosene lamp has a problem of producing pop sound/bursting which is danger to kids. Hence solar lights (Illumination) seem to be more effective in this manner for health of our families and no disturbances.

Economically

Kerosene is very expensive and its cost per liter tends to shoot from time to time. We have many things to accomplish with the available money rather than using in kerosene whereby in my family we were using 5 liter per month.

We are staying far from town and it involves costs for travelling while looking for kerosene but with the use of solar lights there is no costs associated, just the initial cost of buying it. The amount served from not purchasing kerosene help us in bus fare for our child who is studying in secondary at Himo which is a day school.

The use of solar lights serves time for other activities rather than looking for kerosene from a distance.

Kerosene lamps involve other costs of buying lamp glass as it is fragile of which approximately four to five times per year it may break and hence need replacement while in solar lights there is no such costs, no maintenance has been required so far (we have had the light for one year) unlike other products which were brought in the village which have had problems.

Reference Link
http://illuminationhq.com/blog/a-success-story-abbas-jumanne-family/

Courtesy
ILLUMI Nation HQ

The Way We Design Now

It’s strange to think that just a few years ago, it felt as if design schools and studios nationwide must have been holding special screenings of “The Graduate.” Down the aisles of Target, in the pages of Dwell and the showrooms of SoHo, there was nary a natural material in sight: the future was plastic.

‘Garbino’ trashcan for Umbra.

“Plastic was the material that I naively knew was the material of our contemporary world, even at the age of 10,” the designer Karim Rashid said in a 2006 interview. Rashid has certainly been plastic’s most high-profile ambassador, using it for everything from dish-soap containers to the (then) ubiquitous $7 “Garbino” trashcans that made him famous. Many other designers were similarly enamored with the way plastic could become any color or shape, and though products made from the material were offered at all price ranges, plastic delivered on the popular premise of good design for all because it could be used to create on the cheap.

Though our connected culture would be lost without it, plastic assumes a radically different role in the design world: its most high-profile usage of late comes not in throwaway consumer goods but rather in the form of the 12,500 plastic bottles (that’s about the same number consumed every 8.3 seconds in the United States) used to build the Plastiki, a wind-blown, solar-powered boat currently sailing from San Francisco to Australia, stopping at environmental hot spots like the roughly Texas-sized North Pacific Garbage Patch or Pacific Gyre along the way. The goal of the Plastiki voyage is to encourage people to re-think waste: according to Project Aware, 15 billion pounds of plastic are produced in the U.S. every year, for example, but only 1 billion pounds are recycled.

Courtesy Plastiki Crew, top; Adventure Ecology The Plastiki solar-powered boat, made from 12,500 plastic bottles.

It would be overstating things to say that Plastiki is helping chart a new course for design, but the vessel and the voyage do provide a nice departure point for discussing the place the discipline finds itself today. Though the expedition leader, David de Rothschild, has in many ways been the face of Plastiki, the project as a whole speaks to the reality of collaboration versus individual creation. The Plastiki site acknowledges a team including diver, documentarian, boat builder and solar array designer. Designers like Philippe Starck may have turned their attention to things like wind turbines now, but most design efforts these days, whether for iPods or affordable apartments, seem to be very much the product of teams. Coming off an era where designers assumed the role of artist/auteur, that’s a big shift.

Plastiki, in engaging with a host of environmental technologies and issues, also mirrors a broad cultural shift in design’s focus. Design now exists less to shape objects than to produce solutions. Instead of creating a desire and designing an object to fulfill it, a designer spotlights a problem or need and solves it. The latter has not completely displaced the former, but it has become the prevailing discourse. So it’s fitting that the newest edition of the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial questions the purpose — and future — of the discipline with an exhibit called “Why Design Now?”

Weil Ausstellungssystem GmbH Kraftplex, a 100 percent biodegradable alternative to plastic.

The Triennial, which opened in mid-May, assuages any fears surrounding the capabilities of natural materials. In fact, inventiveness around unremarkable stuff from sunflowers to banana stems has resulted in numerous greener alternatives to plastic on display here, including Bananaplac, an alternative to hardwood and Formica, produced from banana fibers extracted when the fruit is harvested; AgriPlast, made from field grass and polystyrene; Kraftplex, a 100 percent biodegradable fiberboard made from sustainably harvested soft wood fibers, water, pressure and heat; and Flax, a natural fiber typically used to make linen but transformed by designer Francois Azambourg into high-performing recyclable furniture like the Lin94 Chair. But new materials are always being introduced, and their inclusion here is just a small part of a much larger story.

“Why Design Now?” is an important show because design is in a strange place. One always hears talk about the need to not reinvent the wheel; well, the design community — some of it, anyway — has realized the need to stop reinventing the chair. This is not to suggest that design should fully move away from making things — and indeed, the Cooper Hewitt show is chock full of smartly conceived, necessary objects like the AdSpecs, low-cost corrective eyeglasses with lenses the user can adjust to his or her own individual prescriptions; the Modular Prosthetic Limb System, created by a multi-disciplinary team culled from more than 30 American, Canadian and European organizations, and the Zon hearing aid by Stuart Karten Design, a minimalist accessory rendered so elegantly as to erase any need for self-consciousness on the part of the wearer. There are thoughtful, beautiful ones as well, like Karinelvy Design’s blown glass Gripp glasses, so graceful one might not even notice they were designed to function for anyone, even people with limited hand function, and Alabama Chanin’s hand-sewn garments that favor local commerce over overseas production.

Oxford Centre for Vision in the Developing World, left; Starkey Laboratories, Inc., center; Karin Eriksson, right. From left: Self-adjustable prescriptive eyewear created by Joshua Silver; minimalist hearing aid designed by Stuart Karten; universal-design glassware by Karinlevy Design.

The show actively engages with the question designers both emerging and established must ask today: If not objects, what? It’s a dilemma closely mirroring that of the larger American economy, which has been shifting steadily from manufacturing to service. In response, design schools are scrambling to offer curricula that moves away from what Jon Kolko describes as “the Bauhaus, form-giving stuff.” Kolko, founder of the Austin Center for Design, a newly formed educational institution that “exists to transform society through design and design education,” believes that our recession-weary era is absolutely ready for this sort of work to thrive. “All the travesty and direness is making all the right things happen,” he says. “Kids today don’t care about the big house, the big salary. At the heart of their value system is ‘I want to make a difference.’”

With an eye to contributing to the greater good, practitioners might design a game, a process, procedure or experience. For example, Emily Pilloton founded the non-profit design collective Project H (the “h” stands for humanity, habitats, health and happiness) after a demoralizing stint designing doorknobs. The 28-year-old now designs projects like the Learning Landscape, which takes a creative approach to math education by installing a public sculpture-like grid of half-submerged tires as a setting for math games. Another example might be Participle, which bills itself as a public service design firm, and has developed and prototyped new services to help combat social isolation and loneliness among the elderly.

Project H Design Adaptable to any setting, Project H’s Learning Landscape uses reclaimed tires, sand, lumber and chalk to create a setting for math games.

In showcasing the work of Pilloton and many of her peers, this year’s version of the Triennial feels very much of a piece with another Cooper Hewitt exhibit presented in 2007, “Design for the Other 90%” (now on view at the National Geographic Society Museum, Washington, D.C., through September). The low-cost innovations in health, shelter, energy and transport for the 5.8 billion people globally with little or no access not only to most products and services but also to food, shelter or clean water have become the sort of things young designers want to engage with today. (Though creating smart business models for this work may be the most challenging of design projects they could undertake.) “Why Design Now?” might well have been called “What Should Designers Do Now?”

Reference Link
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/the-way-we-design-now/

Courtesy
The New York Times Compan y

G8 seeks new drive to meet 2015 aid goals for poor

Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes part in the G8/G20 National Youth Caucus on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, May 17, 2010.

Credit: Reuters/Chris Wattie

Reuters) – The Group of Eight industrialized nations plan to invest in better health for mothers and young children in poor nations to meet faltering goals for slashing world poverty by 2015, a draft text for a G8 summit said.

The five-page draft for the June 25-26 summit in Canada, dated March 12, said the “greatest economic crisis in generations” had “jeopardized our ability to meet the 2015 targets” for aiding developing nations set in 2000.

It was unclear how far the text, obtained by Reuters on Monday and including references to progress toward world economic recovery, had changed in recent weeks with shockwaves from a debt crisis in Greece.

“We undertake to champion a new initiative on maternal, newborn and under-five child health,” according to the draft. It left a blank for how much money the eight nations would provide.

“Urgent collective action must be taken to regain lost ground and quicken the pace of progress” toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it said. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has sought focus on women and children.

In 2000, world leaders agreed 2015 goals for slashing poverty, hunger, disease, maternal and child deaths, and for improving the environment, education and gender equality.

Among the goals lagging most, more than 500,000 women die every year from causes linked to pregnancy and nearly nine million children die before they reach the age of five, the G8 said.

CLIMATE

The draft also said G8 nations would seek a new legal framework for a U.N.-led deal to combat climate change after a U.N. summit in Copenhagen in December fell short of a treaty.

But the G8 nations — the United States, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada — set no new dates for reaching an accord after Copenhagen overran a 2009 deadline.

In 2010 “we will strive to achieve a fair, effective and comprehensive post-2012 agreement that includes a robust system of emissions reductions monitoring, reporting and verification,” it said.

The G8 reaffirmed a goal set in a non-binding Copenhagen Accord of limiting a rise in temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times.

“Achieving this global climate challenge requires global mitigation action,” it said, but omitted vital details of how the curbs on greenhouse gas emissions would be shared out.

It gave new support to a goal set at a G8 summit in 2008 of launching 20 large-scale demonstration projects for carbon capture and storage — trapping greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants, for instance, and burying them underground.

“G8 leaders commit to take concrete actions to accelerate worldwide implementation of these projects and set a new goal to achieve this by 2015,” the statement said.

For Reuters latest environment blogs, click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64U2KB20100531?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters

Sweep yields leads for new malaria drugs

Researchers hope the studies’ findings will lead to a new generation of antimarial drugs (Source: WEHI/Drew Berry)

A massive screening of chemicals has turned up thousands of compounds that could lead to new drugs in the fight against malaria, according to a pair of studies published today.

Malaria affects a quarter of a billion people worldwide, and claims upward of 850,000 lives every year, particularly children in the poorer nations of Africa and Asia.

Preventative measures such as the use of insecticide-treated bed nets has helped cut infection rates dramatically in some of the worst-hit countries, and treatments based on a class of drugs called artemisinin have sharply reduced mortality.

But the rise of new, drug-resistant strains of the disease could wipe out that progress unless alternative compounds are found, the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned.

Multiple targets

An international team of researchers led by R Kiplin Guy of St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee combed through more than 300,000 candidate chemicals.

Their study, published in the journal Nature, identified 1100 agents out of more than 300,000 candidates that inhibited growth of the deadly Plasmodium falciparum parasite that causes the disease by at least 80%.

A more select subset of 172 compounds all had chemical structures unlike those in existing anti-malarial drugs, according to the study.

The fact that these novel agents acted on different targets in the mosquito-borne parasite could prove crucial in beating back the emerging threat of drug-resistant variants.

As a proof of principle, the researchers showed that one of the compounds was effective in treating malaria in a mouse model, albeit at a very high concentration.

Going public

In a second study, also appearing in Nature, Jose Garcia-Bustos of GlaxoSmithKline and colleagues screened around two million agents in the pharmaceutical giant’s in-house chemical library.

Setting a similar threshold for blocking the parasite’s growth, the researchers uncovered 13,500 promising active compounds.

Significantly, 8000 of them were equally effective against multi-drug resistant P. falciparum parasites.

More than 11,000 of the “hits” were proprietary compounds owned by the drug company, which has taken the unusual step of transferring them to the public domain, where they are available researchers anywhere in the world.

“These reports offer tremendous opportunities to develop the next generation of antimalarial drugs,” says David Fidock, a researcher at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Also writing in Nature, Fidock cautions that it is only a “starting point,” and that time was running short.

Reference Link
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/05/20/2904634.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Courtesy
ABC

Spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down

Mary Poppins was right: A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down, according to the results of a new study.

Dr Denise Harrison, of the Royal Childrens Hospital in Melbourne, and colleagues found that giving less than half a teaspoon of a sugary solution to infants up to 12 months of age reduces crying and pain due to vaccination.

The large-scale statistical study, which appears online ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, combined immunisation data from 1618 infants.

Harrison says giving sugar solutions by mouth to newborns before painful procedures is known to be effective at reducing pain, but until now there was no evidence to support the practice in older babies.

“We located a potential 700 published trials for inclusion in our study, but found only 14 randomly administered a sugary solution or water or no treatment to infants older than a month”, says Harrison.

The sweeter the better

Where possible, the team analysed the incidence of crying, the length of time the children cried and their pain scores, which can include assessments of facial expression, arm and leg movements, breathing and heart rate, in addition to crying.

The amount of sugar made a difference, but because there was a wide variety of volumes and concentrations used in the separate trials, the researchers can’t say what the ideal dose is.

“We were, however, able to combine and analyse three trials where the infants all received a 30% glucose solution and found that, compared with those given water, they were 20% less likely to cry,” says Harrison. “This is much sweeter than flat lemonade.”

“Interestingly, breast milk is not very sweet by comparison, and expressed milk seems to be no more effective than water. But when babies are breast fed, the combination of milk and the sucking is a very effective technique”.

Theory into practice

Registered nurse Karen Booth is on the Board of Directors of the Australian Practice Nurses Association and says she uses a number of distraction techniques prior to and during vaccination, including giving ‘snake lollies’ to the older children.

Booth is excited by the new findings and hopes that that they will have a positive effect on parents who are reluctant to have their children vaccinated because of concerns regarding pain.

“Some mothers get quite distressed,” she says. “Others are reluctant to give babies sweet things because of the misconception that it will give them a sweet tooth.”

Harrison says their study, which was conducted while she was at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, supports the use of a small amount of a sweet solution for children undergoing a range of painful procedures.

“I have no problem with that”, says Booth, “we already have glucose solutions in the clinic that we can use, but we really need the request to come from the parents”.

The pain-relieving (analgesic) effects of sweet solutions given to older infants were also found to be more moderate than those in newborns.

“The effects seem to wear off more quickly in the older infants so, ideally, you’d give a small amount of a sweet solution – greater than 20% – two minutes before the first injection and then additional drops before every needle,” says Harrison.

But, Harrison cautions that this technique should not be used at home as the effect is short-lasting and you could end up giving baby a lot of sugar, which is bad for their teeth.

Reference Link
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/05/13/2898424.htm

Courtesy
ABC

Gates backs 78 new projects for health innovation

Microsoft Corporation founder Bill Gates at Columbia University in New York November 12, 2009.

(Reuters) – Efforts to develop a vaccine triggered by human sweat, and to control mosquitoes using carnivorous plants, were among 78 science projects that won backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Tuesday.

The foundation, a $34 billion fund that is run by the multi-billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates and invests in scientific projects broadly aimed at improving global health, said each project would get a $100,000 grant for further study.

Other winning projects include developing a low-cost cell phone microscope to diagnose malaria, using ultrasound as a reversible male contraceptive, insecticide-treated scarves and using imaging systems to seek and destroy parasites with a targeted laser vaccine.

“We are convinced that some of these ideas will lead to innovations and eventually solutions that will save lives,” Tachi Yamada, of the Gates Foundation’s global health program, said in a statement.

The foundation said winners were from universities, research institutes and non-profit organizations in 18 countries around the world.

One group of scientists in Germany will use their grant to develop nanoparticles that penetrate the skin through hair follicles and burst on contact with human sweat to release vaccines.

Grants will also help researchers investigate new ways to fight malaria: one team is trying to see whether treating traditional scarves worn by migrant workers along the Thai-Cambodia border with insecticide will reduce drug-resistant malaria; in Uganda, a team is testing the ability of insect-eating plants to reduce the number of malaria-transmitting mosquitoes.

Scientists in the United States will use the grant to study the ability of ultrasound to temporarily deplete testicular sperm counts for possible use as new male contraceptive.

The grants were awarded by the foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations scheme – a five-year $100 million initiative which seeks to promote innovation in global health.

Gates, the world’s richest man, is co-founder of Microsoft Corp and remains chairman of the company, although he focuses much of his attention on the foundation.

Since opening in 1994, the foundation has handed out more than $21 billion in grants.

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64A3I320100511?feedType=nl&feedName=ushealth1100

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters

OJ a possible source of vitamin D

Woman drinking orange juice (iStockphoto)

A glass of orange juice may not only help the vitamin pill go down, it may be as effective as the supplement itself.

A new study, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggests that fortified varieties of juice can also help the body’s vitamin D levels go up.

The finding could bring a welcome addition to a very short list of sources for vitamin D, which is thought to help fend off an array of health problems including brittle bones, diabetes, and cancer.

“A lot of people don’t drink milk,” which has been fortified with vitamin D since the 1930s, “but they do drink OJ in the morning,” says the study’s lead author Dr Michael Holick of the Boston University School of Medicine.

Simply adding a vitamin to a food does not guarantee its absorption in the body. In fact, since vitamin D dissolves in fat but not water, there was concern that only fatty foods such as milk could be used.

But preliminary research several years ago by Holick and his team suggested that orange juice, not known for its fat content, might be an effective way to deliver the vitamin.

Another option?

Still, the question remained of whether the body could make use of as much vitamin D from orange juice as it could from a supplement. So the team recruited about 100 adults and had them drink a glass of orange juice every morning and to swallow a capsule every night for 11 weeks.

Some of the juices were fortified with 1000 international units (IU) of vitamin D; others were vitamin-free placebos that looked and tasted the same. The capsules also came with or without vitamin D. Participants were randomly assigned one of each.

About 85% of the participants began the study with blood levels of vitamin D below the recommended healthy minimums. Over the course of the 11 weeks, levels among those receiving vitamin D rose significantly. And the rise appeared to be the same regardless of whether the vitamin was consumed in juice or capsule form.

As expected, participants who had received both placebos showed no improvement in their vitamin D levels.

“The consumer now has one more option for obtaining vitamin D in the diet,” says Dennis Wagner, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. His research group recently added to the list themselves: cheese.

Unfortunately, he says, government regulations currently allow only 100 IU of vitamin D to be added to a serving of food or drink.

While that number could go up when the US government revises its dietary guidelines this summer, Holick is concerned that it will still be too low to ensure healthy levels of vitamin D through diet alone. He recommends 2000 IU a day for adults, and 1000 IU for children.

Sunshine time

Natural food sources are rare – mostly just oily fish and mushrooms – and Holick thinks it would be unrealistic to expect everyone to start taking supplements.

His solution is a controversial one: short spurts of unprotected time in the sun, the major natural source of vitamin D. He does, however, advise always protecting the face.

“Mother Nature designed the system very early to guarantee that we got enough vitamin D,” says Holick. “Everyone was outside all the time, making it for free.'”

Wagner agrees, saying that humans are able to make a healthy dose of vitamin D in a relatively short amount of time before the skin starts to turn red and the risk of skin cancer begins to rise.

“However, the reliance on sunlight exposure as the primary source of vitamin D is often impractical, especially in northern latitudes during the winter,” says Wagner.

“An increase in the number and variety of foods fortified with vitamin D will increase the availability of this important vitamin … and prevent the detrimental health consequences associated with vitamin D deficiency.”

Reference Link
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2010/05/10/2894807.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Courtesy
ABC

Muhamma to launch ‘totally clean village' project

Chief Minister to inaugurate the scheme on May 23

---

Aim of the project is to ensure completely sanitised and healthy village

Project is part of a comprehensive plan

of the panchayat

---

ALAPPUZHA: Muhamma grama panchayat is taking its healthcare activities a step ahead by launching ‘Our Village, Healthy Village’ project, which will aim at ensuring a totally clean, sanitised and healthy village. The project, a continuation of the various healthcare initiatives the panchayat has been implementing over the last decade, will be inaugurated by Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan at 4 p.m. on May 23.

Health Minister P.K. Sreemathy will inaugurate a health exhibition on the occasion while Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac, Revenue Minister K.P. Rajendran, Local Administration Minister Paloli Mohammedkutty and Coir Minister for Cooperation and Coir G. Sudhakaran are slated to attend the various functions being organised in connection with the project launch, panchayat president C.K. Bhaskaran told a press conference here.

Health festival

Ahead of the project launch, the panchayat would organise a ‘Comprehensive Health Festival’ from Wednesday that would continue till May 27. The festival would comprise sanitation programmes with the help of the public, Allopathy, Ayurveda and Homoeopathy medical camps from May 6 to 21 and health awareness family gatherings in all wards from May 7 to 11.

Cultural programmes with health as the main theme will also be organised on May 17 and 18 while a painting competition will be conducted on May 20, Mr. Bhaskaran said.

A two-day State-level seminar to deliberate on the various healthcare initiatives of the panchayat, to be organised under the aegis of the Kerala Institute of Local Administration (KILA), will also be part of the programmes ahead of the formal launch of the project.

Various projects

Over the past 10 years, Muhamma gama pnchayat has been undertaking various healthcare projects, including the ‘Santhwanam’ project to extend palliative care to the terminally-ill; the formation of a Health Task Force; a counselling centre for people with psychological issues; a blood pressure examination clinic; a filariasis care clinic; and the Mukthi project for tuberculosis patients, to name a few.

A comprehensive health action plan for the entire panchayat is also being chalked out and will be ready shortly, Mr. Bhaskaran added.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/05/stories/2010050554480300.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

Mega health camp from May 17

KARIMNAGAR: Taking cue from Chinna Jeeyar Swamy’s concept of “Healthy mother will make a healthy family”, the Chalmeda Ananda Rao Institute of Medical Sciences in collaboration with the Vikasa Tharangini Karimnagar branch has decided to conduct a mega free oral, breast and cervical cancer treatment camps in the entire Karimnagar district. Chalmeda Ananda Rao Institute of Medical Sciences chairman and Vikasa Tharangini State vice-president Ch. Laxminarasimha Rao told “The Hindu” here on Monday that the free cancer treatment camps would be conducted throughout the district. On an experimental basis, the project would be launched on May 17 in Durshed village of Karimnagar mandal.

The doctors of Chalmeda hospital would conduct free screenings and medical tests free of cost. They would also conduct surgeries at their hospital free of cost and the radiations would be done in Hyderabad. He said that they would also conduct awareness programmes on cervical cancer.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/04/stories/2010050458240300.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

'Green' exercise quickly 'boosts mental health'

Just five minutes of exercise in a “green space” such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.

There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being.

In the latest analysis, UK researchers looked at evidence from 1,250 people in 10 studies and found fast improvements in mood and self-esteem.

The study in the Environmental Science and Technology journal suggested the strongest impact was on young people.

The research looked at many different outdoor activities including walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming in locations such as a park, garden or nature trail.

The biggest effect was seen within just five minutes.

With longer periods of time exercising in a green environment, the positive effects were clearly apparent but were of a smaller magnitude, the study found.

Looking at men and women of different ages, the researchers found the health changes – physical and mental – were particularly strong in the young and the mentally-ill.

Green and blue

A bigger effect was seen with exercise in an area that also contained water – such as a lake or river.

Study leader Jules Pretty, a researcher at the University of Essex, said those who were generally inactive, or stressed, or with mental illness would probably benefit the most from “green exercise”.

We would like to see all doctors considering exercise as a treatment where appropriate Paul Farmer, Mind

“Employers, for example, could encourage staff in stressful workplaces to take a short walk at lunchtime in the nearest park to improve mental health.”

He also said exercise programmes outdoors could benefit youth offenders.

“A challenge for policy makers is that policy recommendations on physical activity are easily stated but rarely adopted widely.”

Paul Farmer, chief executive of mental health charity Mind, said the research is yet further evidence that even a short period of green exercise can provide a low cost and drug-free therapy to help improve mental wellbeing.

“It’s important that people experiencing depression can be given the option of a range of treatments, and we would like to see all doctors considering exercise as a treatment where appropriate.”

Mind runs a grant scheme for local environmental projects to help people with mental illness get involved in outdoor activities.

Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8654350.stm

Courtesy
BBC News