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Time of India
3 days ago
- Health
- Time of India
Vizag's King George Hospital among 10 centres in country to participate in oral cholera vaccine trials
Visakhapatnam: King George Hospital in Visakhapatnam is one of 10 centres in the country that participated in phase III trials of oral cholera vaccine Hillchol, developed by Bharat Biotech. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Of the 1,800 enrolled participants across these 10 sites, 1,794 completed the clinical study, which assessed the safety, immunogenicity, and non-inferiority of Hillchol in comparison to a comparator vaccine in this diverse participant group. Post-vaccination, the percentage of participants in the Hillchol group who exhibited a four-fold increase in anti-Vibrio cholerae antibody titres was 68.25% for Ogawa and 69.52% for Inaba. For the uninformed, among the various serotypes of the Vibrio cholerae O1 biotype, Ogawa and Inaba are primarily associated with cholera outbreaks, as they exhibit distinct antigenic variations in their lipopolysaccharide structure. Cholera is an acute diarrhoeal infection caused by ingesting food or water contaminated with Vibrio cholerae bacteria. Approximately, V. cholerae affects 1.3 to 4.0 million people per year, causing between 21,000 and 1.43 lakh deaths worldwide, predominantly in developing nations across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Children under five years of age account for about half of all cases and deaths, although individuals of all ages are susceptible. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently reported that the dynamics of cholera outbreaks are becoming increasingly complex, with a rise in the number of cases since 2021, highlighting the escalating challenge of controlling V. cholerae infections and transmission. The global demand for OCVs is close to 100 million doses per year. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Yet, given that only a single manufacturer supplies them, a global shortage persists. According to Bharat Biotech, its facilities in Hyderabad and Bhubaneswar have the capacity to produce up to 200 million doses of Hillchol. The new-generation OCV, featuring a simplified single stable O1 Hikojima strain, aims to enhance production efficiency and affordability. It induces robust antibodies against both Ogawa and Inaba serotypes, improving accessibility, particularly in lower- and middle-income countries where waterborne diseases continue to pose serious health threats. A total of 1,800 participants were screened based on health status across the 10 trial sites to ensure a diverse demographic analysis. Participants with a history of cholera vaccination or infection, hypersensitivity to past vaccinations, immune disorders, significant acute symptoms, or recent treatment for diarrhoea were excluded. All trial sites were tertiary care centres, including KGH Visakhapatnam, located in urban areas. Participants were enrolled after obtaining informed consent. The other centres were located in states such as Maharashtra, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Goa, and Bihar. The trial achieved a completion rate of 99% (1,782 participants), with a discontinuation rate of 1% attributed to various reasons. No serious adverse events were reported, with the majority of adverse events being mild. According to the researchers, this highlights the safety of the vaccine as a viable OCV option and the reliability of its manufacturing processes. Its scalability and logistical benefits also highlight its potential to mitigate the OCV shortage. The study findings have been published in Vaccine, a journal from ScienceDirect.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
113 Million-Year-Old 'Hell Ant' Discovery Is Oldest Ever Found
A bad day and a dead end for a Cretaceous ant has parlayed into some pretty spectacular science some 113 million years later. The tiny insect, fossilized in a chunk of limestone in Brazil, is the oldest known ant specimen ever identified. Even better, it's a member of an extinct subfamily called Haidomyrmecinae – more affectionately known as 'hell ants' – that have vertically articulated, scythe-like mandibles used for spearing and pinning their prey. It's a newly discovered species, and its name is Vulcanidris cratensis. "Our team has discovered a new fossil ant species representing the earliest undisputable geological record of ants," says entomologist Anderson Lepeco of the Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo in Brazil. "What makes this discovery particularly interesting is that it belongs to the extinct 'hell ant,' known for their bizarre predatory adaptations. Despite being part of an ancient lineage, this species already displayed highly specialized anatomical features, suggesting unique hunting behaviors." Ants are among the most diverse and abundant animals on the planet today, with over 13,800 species known, of an estimated total of around 22,000. We barely notice them, living out their bustling ant lives, so ubiquitous are they on almost every continent. No living ant, however, resembles the hell ant family. They're notable for their sometimes ornate head architecture, which can involve metal-reinforced spikes, and the alignment of their jaws: up-and-down, rather than side-to-side like all the other ants that are around today. This group is mostly known from specimens preserved in amber from across Europe, Asia, and North America, from between about 80 to 100 million years ago. V. cratensis, by contrast, is a remarkably well-preserved fossil from the Crato Formation Lagerstätte, a type of fossil bed that produces exceptionally detailed fossils. This makes it several firsts. It's the first hell ant known from a rock impression fossil; and it's the first found on the South American continent, suggesting that hell ants were both older and more widely distributed than we knew. The researchers used micro-CT imaging to analyze the fossil, teasing out its anatomical peculiarities from the flattened impression in the Crato Formation limestone. They found, interestingly, that it appeared to be most closely related to the hell ant species Aquilomyrmex huangi from 99 million years ago that was found in Myanmar amber. "While we expected to find hell ant features, we were shocked by the characteristics of its feeding apparatus," Lepeco says. "Finding such an anatomically specialized ant from 113 million years ago challenges our assumptions about how quickly these insects developed complex adaptations. The intricate morphology suggests that even these earliest ants had already evolved sophisticated predatory strategies significantly different from their modern counterparts." Ants are thought to have first emerged sometime between the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous periods, with hell ants potentially representing the first lineage to diverge. The discovery of a hell ant in a new part of the world, much earlier than other species, and with well-established anatomy, gives scientists a new touchstone for understanding the evolution of this diverse, ubiquitous group of insects. "The newly reported species represents the oldest definitive ant known to science and also the most complete evidence for the early evolution of ants in the fossil record," the researchers write in their paper. "Hell ants may have endured for a long time through the angiosperm terrestrial spread during the Cretaceous, before being decisively affected by geological events toward the end of that period." The research has been published in Current Biology. Most Bees Nest in The Ground. Offering Rocks And Gravel Is a Simple Way to Help Them Thrive. This Secret Mathematical Rule Has Shaped Beaks For 200 Million Years Giant Wave in Pacific Ocean Was The Most Extreme 'Rogue Wave' on Record
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming this fall. It's his first in 12 years
NEW YORK (AP) — One month shy of his 88th birthday, Thomas Pynchon is set to publish his first book in 12 years. 'Shadow Ticket' is scheduled for Oct. 7, Penguin Press announced Wednesday. You could call the book, set in Milwaukee in 1932, Pynchon-esque. 'Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who's taken a mind to go wandering,' the publisher's announcement reads in part. 'Before he knows it, he's been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there's no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he's supposed to be chasing.' The famously expansive, and press-averse author has not released a new book since 'Bleeding Edge' in 2013. He is best known for the classic 'Gravity's Rainbow,' and his other works include 'V.', 'Mason & Dixon," 'Against the Day' and 'Inherent Vice.'
Associated Press
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming this fall. It's his first in 12 years
NEW YORK (AP) — One month shy of his 88th birthday, Thomas Pynchon is set to publish his first book in 12 years. 'Shadow Ticket' is scheduled for Oct. 7, Penguin Press announced Wednesday. You could call the book, set in Milwaukee in 1932, Pynchon-esque. 'Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he's found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who's taken a mind to go wandering,' the publisher's announcement reads in part. 'Before he knows it, he's been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there's no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement – and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he's supposed to be chasing.' The famously expansive, and press-averse author has not released a new book since 'Bleeding Edge' in 2013. He is best known for the classic 'Gravity's Rainbow,' and his other works include 'V.', 'Mason & Dixon,' 'Against the Day' and 'Inherent Vice.'
New York Times
19-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
J.F.K., Blown Away, What Else Do I Have to Say?
On his third day in office in January, President Trump ordered the release of documents from the National Archives related to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Trump declared on the campaign trail, 'It's been 60 years, time for the American people to know the TRUTH.' The truth is that nothing in the archives is going to dispel the fog of hypothesis, rumor and speculation that swirls around these killings. The assassinations of the 1960s — President Kennedy's in particular — remain the source and paradigm of modern conspiratorial thinking, a style of argument to which the current president is passionately committed. Whatever details emerge now are unlikely to settle the ongoing debates, which are less about what happened in Dallas in 1963 (or Memphis and Los Angeles five years later) than about the character of the American state and the nature of reality itself. Was Kennedy killed by the Mafia? By the C.I.A.? Was he an early, liberal victim of what modern conservatism has come to call the Deep State? A lot of people think so, and there may be unanswered questions hovering around his death. But there's a thin line between skepticism and paranoia, between reasonable guesses and wild invention. The American imagination often gravitates to the far side of that line, and the Kennedy assassination was one of the shocks that pushed us over it. By 1963, we were already headed in that direction. Suspicion was part of the atmosphere of the Cold War years, when what Kennedy himself called the 'twilight struggle' between the United States and the Soviet Union was accompanied by the rapid growth of the American security state, which rested equally on paperwork and secrecy. Through the years of McCarthy, Sputnik and the quiz show scandals, paranoia was in the air. Kennedy's killing was almost immediately folded into a narrative structure that had already surfaced in popular culture as well as politics, a mode of storytelling that treated public events as the expressions of secret plots. Richard Condon's Cold War thriller 'The Manchurian Candidate' (published in 1959 and adapted by Hollywood in 1962) and Thomas Pynchon's shaggy-dog experimental whodunit 'V.' are among the best-known pre-assassination examples of this paranoid style in American fiction. (The phrase 'paranoid style' comes from an influential essay on political conspiratorialism by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, originally delivered as a lecture shortly before the assassination and published in Harper's in 1964.) That same year, the Warren Commission Report emphatically concluded that Oswald was the sole shooter and the only party responsible for Kennedy's killing. Yet the report did anything but close the case. Through the years that followed, the commission was subjected to a steady stream of revisionism and rebuttal, carried out first by journalists and politicians and later, perhaps more decisively, by novelists and filmmakers. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
