India behind other nations in child care: Human Rights Watch

NEW YORK: India is falling behind other nations in improving obstetric care as it does not adequately monitor deaths and injuries in the critical

period following childbirth and fix gaps in its health system and programmes, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Wednesday.

Health experts say that the key to progress in maternal health is ensuring that women with pregnancy complications are able to get appropriate care during childbirth.

“But HRW research shows this is not happening in India even though it has started healthcare programmes that guarantee free obstetric care to rural women,” said a HRW statement.

Aruna Kashyap, researcher for the Women’s rights division of HRW, said: “India should be a leader in protecting and monitoring women’s sexual and reproductive health. Yet women continue to die entirely preventable deaths, and health authorities do not track down the reasons or do what is needed to rectify the health system.”

The government counts the number of births in health clinics and hospitals but these are often “woefully under-resourced and under-staffed”, it said. Many women die or suffer serious injury after giving birth under these circumstances.

The rights body claimed that the Indian government does not monitor what happens to women after childbirth, especially in the following 24 to 72 critical hours, when the chances of dying are the highest. “Without this information, it cannot save women who go back home and die or develop long-lasting complications.”

It suggested that the Indian government change its approach to monitoring and examine whether women with pregnancy-related complications are in fact getting the kind of treatment they need and whether they are surviving childbirth in the postpartum period.

Kashyap said: “Counting the number of women who give birth in under-equipped and under-staffed health facilities is meaningless unless the government can show that these women gave birth safely and survived without complications through the immediate postpartum period.”

Bad mood helps us focus more, recall better

Bad mood helps us focus more, recall better People grumbling their way through the grimness of winter have better recall than those enjoying a carefree, sunny day, Australian researchers have found.

 

The University of New South Wales team used a Sydney news agency to test whether people’s moods had an impact on their ability to remember small details.

 

Researchers placed 10 small items on the shop counter, including a toy cannon, red bus and a piggy bank, and quizzed shoppers about what they remembered seeing upon their exit.

 

Lead researcher Joseph Forgas said subjects were able to remember three times as many items on cold, windy, rainy days when there was sombre classical music playing as they were when conditions were sunny and bright.

 

Rainy-day shoppers were also less likely to have false memories of objects that weren’t there, said Forgas.

 

“We predicted and found that weather-induced negative mood improved memory accuracy,” he wrote in the study, which was published in the latest edition of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. “Shoppers in a negative mood showed better memory and higher discrimination ability.”

 

Forgas said a worse mood helped to focus people’s attention on their surroundings and led to a more thorough and careful thinking style, while happiness tended to reduce focus and increase both confidence and forgetfulness.

 

“This finding suggests that some allowance for such mood effects could be incorporated in applied domains such as legal, forensic, counselling and clinical practice,” he said.

Gene ‘has key schizophrenia role’

Two studies have pinpointed a single gene as key to the development and treatment of schizophrenia.

A US team from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute found that a mutated version of the DISC1 gene disrupts the growth and development of brain cells.

And a team from the University of Edinburgh showed that the gene affects how patients respondto     treatment .                                                                                                                                                      

Schizophrenia can have devastating symptoms

Both studies, published in the journals PLoS One and Cell, raise hopes of more effective treatment for schizophrenia

The condition is a common form of mental illness, affecting up to 1% of adults worldwide.

Symptoms tend to appear in late adolescence or early adulthood, and can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and depression.

The US team showed that DISC1 plays a key role in normal brain development and the growth of individual neurons. However, carrying the wrong version of the gene can make this process go awry.

Working on mice, they showed that DISC1 was active, both in cells taken from embryos and in brain stem cells taken from adult mice.

When DISC1 levels were reduced in adult mice their brain cells failed to divide, and the animals developed symptoms mimicking schizophrenia in humans.

Further tests showed that DISC1 acts like lithium, a drug commonly prescribed as mood stabiliser to patients with mental illness, inhibiting the action of a key chemical in the brain.

When mice with depressed levels of DISC1 were treated with this chemical, their symptoms began to improve.

Lead researcher Dr Li-Heui Tsai said: “We need to get a handle on the genetics of schizophrenia, but now we know how DISC1 probably contributes to the disorder, which is a big step.”

Impact on treatment

The Edinburgh researchers analysed data generated by the Human Genome Project, set up to decode the complete genetic blueprint of humans.

They showed DISC1 affects a number of other genes current medications are designed to target.

Dr William Hennah, who led the Edinburgh team, said: “We know that disorders such as schizophrenia have a genetic element and that this specific gene, DISC1, is important to that process.

“This research helps us to understand exactly how it affects brain development and provides clues about how to solve problems when that process goes wrong.”

The charity Rethink, which campaigns on severe mental health issues, described the research as an important step forward in understanding schizophrenia – but only a small step.

A spokesperson said: “With mental illness receiving just 6.5% of research funding in the UK, we can expect it to be a very long time before these findings are developed into major breakthroughs.

“If we really want to unravel the complex causes of schizophrenia and deliver more effective treatments we need a level of research investment proportionate to the enormous human and economic costs of the illness.”