Tag: allotrope

Tobacco in India

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

State governments in India are cracking down on chewing-tobacco products. What were once a royal delight have since become a “health menace”. On October 2nd Himachal Pradesh became the 15th state in India to ban gutka, a form of chewing tobacco made with crushed betel nuts. More than half of all states have done likewise and many others, including Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, are planning to follow suit.

More Indians chew tobacco than smoke it, 26% compared to 14%. Gutka, in particular, is prevalent among children who get addicted thanks to easy access and dirt-cheap prices (1 rupee or 2 cents per sachet). This means India suffers from one of the highest rates of oral cancer in the world, as much as twice the global average. Of the annual 5.6m cancer deaths in India, a third can be blamed on tobacco use.

The central government stands accused of inaction, even though the Supreme Court issued several warnings. Non-governmental organisations had been lobbying for a ban for quite some time. Finally in August 2011 the Food Safety and Standard Authority, aware of the health ministry’s indecisive stand on the matter, issued regulations under which no foodstuff, including gutka, may contain tobacco. The central government’s orders followed in March and the states’ bans followed.

But the tobacco industry is not taking it lightly. Many have dragged the states to court. They claim that gutka falls under the 2003 Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products act, and cannot, therefore, be classified as foodstuff.

The bans are a crucial step forward, for the public-health campaigners. But challenges lie ahead. For instance, enforcement remains difficult—without a nation-wide ban, many users can get their fix from a neighbouring state quite easily. A recent report in the Lancet, a British medical journal, found that, on average, poor countries spend only $1 on tobacco control for every $9,000 they earn in tobacco taxes. According to the World Health Organisation many poor families spend up to 10% of their income on tobacco, leaving that much less to spend on education and health care. Any country’s health-care costs far outweigh the tax income raised through tobacco. A study by America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in 2011 American taxpayers paid $96 billion in health-care costs due to disease caused by smoking, while earning back only $20 billion in tobacco taxes. As their own health-care costs rise, Indian states could do worse than ensuring that the gutka ban stays and is enforced.

Also published on economist.com.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

The evolution of venom: Poison pill

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

The bite of a rattlesnake can, within minutes, cause paralysis and extensive internal bleeding. If untreated it can kill. It might also hold the key to treating high blood pressure, heart diseases and stroke. In 1998 two drugs to prevent heart attacks, derived from rattlesnake and viper venoms, were approved. Since then a number of other venom components have proved effective against some varieties of cancer and brain disorders like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s, but gaining regulatory approval has proved tricky. Part of the reason is that it is difficult to tweak toxins such that they preserve their medicinal effects but lose their nefarious ones, like stanching blood flow or numbing the nervous system.

Now, though, Wolfgang Wüster, of Bangor University, in Britain, and his colleagues have stumbled on an evolutionary mechanism that might make such modifications easier in future. Dr Wüster was investigating venomous snakes and lizards to understand what they had in common. They differ in many respects—most venomous lizards, for instance, have fangs in the lower jaw, whereas snakes have them in the upper jaw. But in 2005 Bryan Fry of Sydney University found that snakes and lizards in fact share venom-making genes, suggesting that both share a venomous reptilian ancestor.

Whereas Dr Fry looked only at selected venom-making genes, Dr Wüster had the luxury of complete genetic data for different snake and lizard species. This allowed him to check if venom-spitting reptiles possess other shared genetic traits, too. As he and his team report in Nature Communications, they do.

These include genes to produce enzymes that perform some basic physiological functions. Intriguingly, some of these housekeeping genes were sitting among venom-producing ones. Venom genes are known to have evolved from more innocuous sorts, but it was thought that all the genes in a particular stretch of DNA assumed the venom-producing function. To find some that did not, therefore, posed a quandary. Were the innocuous genes among the insidious ones simply evolutionary relics? Were they evolved versions of the original innocuous genes that, unlike their venom-producing neighbours, remained innocuous? Or did they in fact evolve from venom genes that had lost their venom-producing prowess?

To help decide the matter, Dr Wüster ran a computer model to trace the genes’ evolutionary histories. This revealed that the third scenario was the most likely. Moreover, it seems that certain housekeeping genes turned into venom-producing ones and back again several times in reptiles’ genetic past. This means that the venom-producing genes and the housekeeping variety nested among them are genetically similar. As such, they produce proteins which are themselves alike in many respects, but not necessarily in their ability to do harm.

Practical applications of this knowledge are not an immediate prospect. But by understanding what makes a venom protein venomous researchers may get a better idea of how to remove the unwanted sting. That is one trick drugmakers would love to be able to pull of.

First published on economist.com.

Image credit: The Economist

Visualising Facebook

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

Your correspondent was shocked to learn that 34% of his Facebook friends are married. Still in his 20s, he does not want to contemplate settling down quite yet. Knowing that 64% of his online friends are male does not help either—more so because only 57% of Facebook is comprised of women. When he lamented these facts (on Facebook of course) he was asked the obvious question: “Did you go through your friends list and count?”

Well, no. The number-crunching comes courtesy of Wolfram|Alpha, a sort of search engine for quantifiable facts. Begun in 2009 by Stephen Wolfram, a British scientist and entrepreneur, the online service serves up answers to queries by harnessing information from its own databases. It can compute things like the distance between the Earth and the Moon on your parents’ first Valentine dinner, for example. Its latest feature lets people analyse their Facebook account for free. Enumerating and plotting the vagaries of one’s online life is at times surprising. Your correspondent wouldn’t have thought he was many times more active in 2011 than this year, in terms of status updates, sharing links, photos, etc (chart below).

Since the service began a few weeks ago, more than 400,000 Facebook users have let Wolfram|Alpha examine their digital bits—an outpouring of interest that caught the firm by surprise, says Luc Barthelet, Wolfram|Alpha’s executive director. The company plans to expand into other “personal analytics” services. Mr Barthelet declined to be more specific, but it could well entail analysing users’ email patterns and other social media behaviour.

In February Wolfram|Alpha rolled out a Pro service. At $4.99 per month it gives people the ability to process their own data, or even download Wolfram|Alpha’s information on a query. Such information is potentially very useful as it comes from the service’s own curated databases. Thus, armed with data on homicides in African countries, for example, Wolfram|Alpha can generate various types of graphs (scatter plot, raw data plots, bivariate histograms) to help users understand their information better. It can create a heat map to visualise the data geographically. And it lets users overlay other data, such as GDP of the country, to make, in this case, a GDP-neutralised heat map.

The Wolfram|Alpha “answer engine” is based on Mathematica, a software program developed by Mr Wolfram that can perform elaborate calculations. After the site’s launch in 2009 it was criticised for being limited in what it could do: solve mathematical problems, answer some scientific questions, but nothing out of the ordinary. Since then it has expanded considerably. As it moves beyond computing the world into analysing the individual, it is providing fresh new ways to look at life.

Also published on economist.com.

Free image from here.