Teledentistry is about delivering data from one point (spoke site) to another point (hub site) using telecommunications technology. Teledentistry is a relatively new field that combines telecommunication technology and dental care. It provides new opportunities for education and delivery of care that offers much potential and challenges. Teledentistry is also useful in long-distance clinical training and continuing education, screening, and dentist laboratory communication. In rural areas, where there is a shortage of specialists, lack of comprehensive and sophisticated health-care teledentistry can extend care to remote patient populations at a reasonable cost as well as ease the problem of a shortage of specialized dental consultants.

Background: Depression is a common mental health problem which affects all strata of life. As a result of the increase in competitiveness, there is a need to pay attention toward the presence and level of depression among students. Aim: The aim of the study was to assess the depressive symptoms and its associated factors among clinical dental students in Bengaluru city. Settings and Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted among third and final years dental students (n = 200) randomly selected from four dental colleges in Bengaluru city. Materials and Methods: A self-administered questionnaire was used to assess depressive symptoms using Beck’s Depression Inventory. Statistical Analysis Used: Association of depression with non-academic and academic factors was assessed using the Chi-square test. Student’s t-test was used to compare mean depression scores among study years. P < 0.05 was considered as significant. Results: The prevalence of depression was found to be 49%. Significantly higher proportion of females (57.0%) had depression compared to males (43.0%) (P = 0.04). Mean depression score was higher among final year dental students (16.10 ± 9.76) compared to third year (13.77 ± 6.85) (P = 0.05). Level of severity of depression was significantly associated with the year of study (P < 0.001). Among non-academic and academic factors; the problem with friends, medical illness, and lack of interest in the course, fear of failure, respectively, was significantly associated with depression. Conclusion: Depression was evident considerably among dental students. The prevalence of depression was higher among females and final year students.

There was a statistically significant difference in the perceptions about tooth brush contamination and disinfection among postgraduates and interns that might be attributed to their higher academic knowledge and clinical experience.

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The review was undertaken to evaluate the development of COVID-19 vaccines in India. This review highlights the different types of platforms to develop COVID-19 vaccines, about the safety and efficacy of available COVID-19 vaccines and various strategies applied by government to increase vaccination doses in India. The analysis was done based on data extraction from online electronic databases and utilized all the data available from the WHO, CDC, Indian Government and State Government official portal for COVID-19 vaccines. Search engines like Google Scholar and PubMed were thoroughly searched for keywords like term “COVID-19 vaccines [AND] India, COVID-19 vaccine development [AND] India”, “COVID-19 vaccine Safety and efficacy [AND] India”, “COVID-19 vaccination [AND] India”. Forty articles were searched based on titles, 10 were excluded after reading the abstract. After scrutinizing all retrieved data only ten highly relevant articles were included in the final analysis. Data available from official portal for COVID-19 vaccination daily updates were collected and used as source data for the current study. Hence the data given in the study completely available from the public source. Despite significant increases in the number of well-trained health personnel, facilities, and sophisticated medical equipment, as well as increased access to and sharing of up-to-date scientific and medical information in many countries, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven that pandemic preparedness remains a major global issue that must be addressed urgently.

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Aims and Objectives: This study aimed to assess the nature and prevalence of misconduct in self and nonself-reported biomedical research. Materials and Methods: A detailed review of previously conducted studies was conducted through PubMed Central, PubMed, and Google Scholar using MeSH terms: “scientific misconduct,” “Publications,” “plagiarism,” and “authorship,” and keywords: scientific misconduct, gift authorship, ghost authorship, and duplicate publication. MeSH terms and keywords were searched in combinations using Boolean operators “AND” and “OR.” Of 7771 articles that appeared in the search, 107 were selected for inspection. The articles were screened for their quality and inclusion criteria. Finally, 16 articles were selected for meta-analysis. Data analysis was conducted using an Open-Source, Open Meta Analyst, statistical software using the package “metaphor.” Results: Plagiarism, data fabrication, and falsification were prevalent in most articles reviewed. The prevalence of research misconduct for plagiarism was 4.2% for self-reported and 27.9% for nonself-reported studies. Data fabrication was 4.5% in self-reported and 21.7% in nonself-reported studies. Data falsification was 9.7% in self-reported and 33.4% in nonself-reported studies, with significant heterogeneity. Conclusion: This meta-analysis gives a pooled estimate of the misconduct in research done in biomedical fields such as medicine, dental, pharmacy, and others across the world. We found that there is an alarming rate of misconduct in recent nonself-reported studies, and they were higher than that in the self-reported studies.