This review discusses the physiology and pharmacological treatment of vertigo and related disorders. Classes of medications useful in the treatment of vertigo include anticholinergics, antihistamines, benzodiazepines, calcium channel antagonists and dopamine receptor antagonists. These medications often have multiple actions. They may modify the intensity of symptoms (e.g. vestibular suppressants) or they may affect the underlying disease process (e.g. calcium channel antagonists in the case of vestibular migraine). Most of these agents, particularly those that are sedating, also have a potential to modulate the rate of compensation for vestibular damage. This consideration has become more relevant in recent years, as vestibular rehabilitation physical therapy is now often recommended in an attempt to promote compensation. Accordingly, therapy of vertigo is optimised when the prescriber has detailed knowledge of the pharmacology of medications being administered as well as the precise actions being sought. There are four broad causes of vertigo, for which specific regimens of drug therapy can be tailored. Otological vertigo includes disorders of the inner ear such as Ménière's disease, vestibular neuritis, benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) and bilateral vestibular paresis. In both Ménière's disease and vestibular neuritis, vestibular suppressants such as anticholinergics and benzodiazepines are used. In Ménière's disease, salt restriction and diuretics are used in an attempt to prevent flare-ups. In vestibular neuritis, only brief use of vestibular suppressants is now recommended. Drug treatments are not presently recommended for BPPV and bilateral vestibular paresis, but physical therapy treatment can be very useful in both. Central vertigo includes entities such as vertigo associated with migraine and certain strokes. Prophylactic agents (L-channel calcium channel antagonists, tricyclic antidepressants, beta-blockers) are the mainstay of treatment for migraine-associated vertigo. In individuals with stroke or other structural lesions of the brainstem or cerebellum, an eclectic approach incorporating trials of vestibular suppressants and physical therapy is recommended. Psychogenic vertigo occurs in association with disorders such as panic disorder, anxiety disorder and agoraphobia. Benzodiazepines are the most useful agents here. Undetermined and ill-defined causes of vertigo make up a large remainder of diagnoses. An empirical approach to these patients incorporating trials of medications of general utility, such as benzodiazepines, as well as trials of medication withdrawal when appropriate, physical therapy and psychiatric consultation is suggested.

Mobile phone can reduce the transaction cost resulted in increasing the farm productivity. This paper mainly focuses on identifying the factors affecting the use of mobile phone by the farmers and determining the extent of use of mobile phone by the farmers in receiving information on vegetable cultivation. The study was carried out at three villages under Mymensingh sub- district of Mymensingh district in Bangladesh. Seventy farmers were interviewed using structured questionnaire during April 1 to May 1 2016. Appropriate scales were used in order to measure the concerned variables. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the collected data. The majority (70 %) of the vegetable farmers were low user of mobile phone compared to 30 percent were medium user. None of them was found under high mobile phone user. Vegetable farmers’ characteristics such as education and social participation had significant positive relationships with their use of mobile phone while age and farming experience had significant relationships with negative trend. Among them age alone explained 33.1 per cent of the variations to mobile phone usage was confirmed by the step-wise multiple regression model. However, age and social participation were the influential factors affecting the use of mobile phone by the farmers. Lack of mobile servicing centre, expensiveness and electricity problem were the major constraints that cause hindrance to the use of mobile phone in receiving information on vegetables cultivation. Government should take initiatives to ensure proper electricity supply in village area and provide subsidy to easily purchase of mobile phone by the farmers. Besides, field extension agents should encourage and assist the farmers to use mobile phone in receiving information on vegetable cultivation.

We sought to confirm the importance of L* protein for growth of Theiler's murine encephalomyelitis virus (TMEV) in a macrophage-like cell line, J774-1. The protein is out of frame with the polyprotein and synthesized in DA but not GDVII subgroup strains of TMEV. A recombinant virus, DANCL*/GD, which substitutes the DA 5′ noncoding and L* coding regions for the corresponding regions of GDVII and synthesizes L* protein, grew with little restriction in J774-1 cells. In contrast, another recombinant virus, DANCL*-1/GD, which has an ACG rather than an AUG as the starting codon of L* protein at nucleotide 1079, resulting in no synthesis of L* protein, did not grow well. No significant difference between the rates of adsorption to J774-1 cells of these viruses was observed. RNase protection assay demonstrated that DANCL*/GD viral RNA significantly increased, whereas only a minimal increase was observed for DANCL*-1/GD. The present study suggests that L* protein is required for virus growth in macrophages.

Fall causes trauma or critical injury among the geriatric population which is a second leading accidental cause of post-injury mortality around the world. It is crucial to keep elderly people under supervision by ensuring proper privacy and comfort. Thus the elderly fall detection and prediction using wearable/ non-wearable sensors become an active field of research. In this work, a novel pipeline for fall detection based on wearable accelerometer data has been proposed. Three publicly available datasets have been used to validate our proposed method, and more than 7700 cross-disciplinary time-series features were investigated for each of the datasets. After following a series of feature reduction techniques such as mutual information, removing highly correlated features using the Pearson correlation coefficient, Boruta algorithm, we have obtained the dominant features for each dataset. Different classical machine learning (ML) algorithms were utilized to detect falls based on the obtained features. For individual datasets, the simple ML classifiers achieved very good accuracy. We have also experimented with the proposed pipeline's efficacy by training and testing it with different datasets. A set of 39 high-performing features is selected, and the classifiers were trained with them. For all the cases, the proposed pipeline showed excellent efficiency in detecting falls. This architecture performed better than most of the existing works in all the used publicly available datasets, proving the supremacy of the proposed data analysis pipeline.

We evaluated the effectiveness of a sand barrier around latrine pits in reducing fecal indicator bacteria (FIB) leaching into shallow groundwater. We constructed 68 new offset single pit pour flush latrines in the Galachipa subdistrict of coastal Bangladesh. We randomly assigned 34 latrines to include a 50 cm thick sand barrier under and around the pit and 34 received no sand barrier. Four monitoring wells were constructed around each pit to collect water samples at baseline and subsequent nine follow-up visits over 24 months. Samples were tested using the IDEXX Colilert method to enumerate E. coli and thermotolerant coliforms most probable number (MPN). We determined the difference in mean log 10 MPN FIB counts/100 mL in monitoring well samples between latrines with and without a sand barrier using multilevel linear models and reported cluster robust standard error. The sand barrier latrine monitoring well samples had 0.38 mean log 10 MPN fewer E. coli (95% CI: 0.16, 0.59; p = 0.001) and 0.38 mean log 10 MPN fewer thermotolerant coliforms (95% CI: 0.14, 0.62; p = 0.002), compared to latrines without sand barriers, a reduction of 27% E. coli and 24% thermotolerant coliforms mean counts. A sand barrier can modestly reduce the risk presented by pit leaching.

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