India is a country of hustlers. And yet, Bangalore, which is the rightful startup capital of the country, hasn’t proven its potential as the next Silicon Valley. That promise was born in the 1990s when it attracted entrepreneurs and investors to what was already home to India’s IT giants: Infosys and Wipro. But success stories from the startup hub have been slow to emerge. A recent example is Flipkart, dubbed as India’s Amazon. The latest addition to the list is RedBus, an online service for bus tickets, which has pulled off a trick that few thought possible.
This year is my fifth living abroad, which means I’ve spent a fifth of my life not in India. Although I may never forget my Indian roots, not living there means I am not constantly faced with the life I once had. Economically my life in India and here in Britain is pretty much the same. Not so socially.
Walking the streets of Nashik or Mumbai, there was no escaping the plight of the poor. Most have to learn to turn a blind eye to it, because there is only so much you can do to help. Even then just that constant reminder is a humbling experience.
There is nothing nice about watching people defecate or having a beggar at every corner, but it is a good reminder of the privileges that we happen to have. And it is this nostalgia which takes me to Mumbai Paused ever so often. It is a blog run by a photographer who calls himself Slogan Murugan. Without telling you more, I’ll let his pictures do their job.
IdChristmasDiwali
While I am using words to help me, Murugan simply posts pictures. And the juxtaposition of images or subjects within an image make a powerful story, leaving you to judge what to make of it.
ShaveTicket counterThe ride
And it’s not all just about poverty. He brings to life some of the most mundane views of the city.
Enlarged microscopic image of TB-causing bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis
When I immigrated to the UK as a student, I had to do something that I wasn’t expecting. I had to carry with me a recent chest X-ray. I thought this was completely unnecessary. Why should I be exposed to X-rays for no good reason?
Turned out that there was a reason. It was to stop the spread of tuberculosis (TB) in the UK. Immigrants from sub-Saharan African and the Indian subcontinent are more likely than other immigrants to be infected by TB. The UK has seen TB cases increase continuously over the past 30 years. Between 1998 and 2009 the numbers rose by 50% to 9040 cases. Most of those affected are foreign-born people. TB infection rates in the UK today are as high as they were in the 1930s, and they are among the highest in any developed country.
The rise in number of cases is despite chest X-ray screening that immigrants have to undergo. That’s because of TB’s quirky ability to show up many years after the TB-causing bacteria infected a person. Researchers find that early detection makes it easier to treat TB, because more severe infections are becoming resistant to current treatments.
With an aim to improve detection rates, Onn Min Kon, a physician at Imperial College London, and colleagues report, in a paper just published in Thorax, that chest X-rays are actually not as effective at detecting TB. Instead, they suggest, the UK government should use an advanced test called interferon-gamma release assays (IGRA).
IGRA works on the principle that when the TB-causing bacteria are exposed to a set of chemicals, which are harmless to humans, it causes them to release a protein called interferon-gamma. If a patient who has been given these chemicals breathes out interferon-gamma, then he is infected by TB (the latent variety or not).
Although a previous consultation with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence had recommended the use of IGRA, it had made that recommendation in combination with chest X-rays. What Dr Kon’s work finds that a more cost-effective, and still efficient, method would be to just use IGRA. It would also spare the patient from being exposed to X-rays!
This research is one among many other papers published in Thorax’s special issue dedicated to TB which coincides with the upcoming World TB day.
Reference: Pareek, Bond, Shorey, Seneviratne, Guy, White, Lalvani & Min Kon, Community-based evaluation of immigrant tuberculosis screening using interferon γ release assays and tuberculin skin testing: observational study and economic analysis, Thorax 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/thoraxjnl-2011-201542
Akshat Rathi 