Hypovitaminosis D is common in India. In the present prospective partially randomised study of vitamin D (D 3 ) supplementation during pregnancy, subjects were randomised in the second trimester to receive either one oral dose of 1500 mg vitamin D 3 (group 1, n 48) or two doses of 3000 mg vitamin D 3 each in the second and third trimesters (group 2, n 49). Maternal 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) at term, cord blood (CB) alkaline phosphatase (ALP), neonatal serum Ca and anthropometry were measured in these subjects and in forty-three non-supplemented mother -infant pairs (usual care). Median maternal 25(OH)D at term was higher in group 2 (58·7, interquartile range (IQR) 38·4 -89·4 nmol/l) v. group 1 (26·2, IQR 17·7-57·7 nmol/l) and usual-care group (39·2, IQR 21·2 -73·4 nmol/l) (P¼ 0·000). CB ALP was increased ( . 8.02 mkat/l or .480 IU/l) in 66·7 % of the usual-care group v. 41·9 % of group 1 and 38·9 % of group 2 (P¼0·03). Neonatal Ca and CB 25(OH)D did not differ significantly in the three groups. Birth weight, length and head circumference were greater and the anterior fontanelle was smaller in groups 1 and 2 (3·08 and 3·03 kg, 50·3 and 50·1 cm, 34·5 and 34·4 cm, 2·6 and 2·5 cm, respectively) v. usual care (2·77 kg, 49·4, 33·6, 3·3 cm; P¼0·000 for length, head circumference and fontanelle and P¼ 0·003 for weight). These differences were still evident at 9 months. We conclude that both 1500 mg and two doses of 3000 mg vitamin D 3 had a beneficial effect on infant anthropometry, the larger dose also improving CB ALP and maternal 25(OH)D.Key words: Vitamin D supplementation: Pregnancy: Infant anthropometry: Neonatal calcium Vitamin D deficiency has been reported to be frequent among adolescent girls and pregnant women in India, with approximately 80 % of both urban and rural subjects having serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) ,50 nmol/l (1,2) . Exposure to the abundant sunlight in India is poor in women because of the traditional modest style of dressing. The resulting consequences to the fetus and the newborn include low cord blood (CB) vitamin D and high alkaline phosphatase (ALP), neonatal hypocalcaemia and poor fetal growth, among others (2,3) . Thus, pharmacological supplementation may be necessary, especially in such vulnerable groups.Although several studies are available on vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy, its appropriate dose is not clear (4) . In a study by Datta et al. (5) , 160 pregnant Asian women in the UK were supplemented with a dose of 20 mg/d, which was later increased to 40 mg/d. However, the rise in maternal serum 25(OH)D was from 14·98 nmol/l to only 27·5 nmol/l. Similar results have been found in other studies that administered small daily doses of similar magnitude (6,7) , though one study (3) found significantly improved CB 25(OH)D in subjects receiving 25 mg/d when compared with controls. Studies that used larger (stoss) doses have done so only in the third trimester, whereas Ca transfer to the fetus has been shown to occur in the second trimester (8) . Marya et al. (...
Biomedical waste has become a serious health hazard in many countries, including India. Careless and indiscriminate disposal of this waste by healthcare establishments and research institutions can contribute to the spread of serious diseases such as hepatitis and AIDS (HIV) among those who handle it and also among the general public. The present study pertains to the biomedical waste management practices at Balrampur Hospital, a premier healthcare establishment in Lucknow, in North India. The study shows that infectious and non-infectious wastes are dumped together within the hospital premises, resulting in a mixing of the two, which are then disposed of with municipal waste at the dumping sites in the city. All types of wastes are collected in common bins placed outside the patients wards. For disposal of this waste the hospital depends on the generosity of the Lucknow Municipal Corporation, whose employees generally collect it every 2 or 3 days. The hospital does not have any treatment facility for infectious waste. The laboratory waste materials, which are disposed of directly into the municipal sewer without proper disinfection of pathogens, ultimately reach the Gomti River. All disposable plastic items are segregated by the rag pickers from the hospital as well as municipal bins and dumps. The waste is deposited either inside the hospital grounds, or outside in the community bin for further transportation and disposal along with municipal solid waste. The open dumping of the waste makes it freely accessible to rag pickers who become exposed to serious health hazards due to injuries from sharps, needles and other types of material used when giving injections. The results of the study demonstrate the need for strict enforcement of legal provisions and a better environmental management system for the disposal of biomedical waste in the Balrampur Hospital, as well as other healthcare establishments in Lucknow.
Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can autonomously explore realistic and complex 3D environments without the context of task-rewards. We propose a learning-based approach and investigate different policy architectures, reward functions, and training paradigms. We find that use of policies with spatial memory that are bootstrapped with imitation learning and finally finetuned with coverage rewards derived purely from on-board sensors can be effective at exploring novel environments. We show that our learned exploration policies can explore better than classical approaches based on geometry alone and generic learning-based exploration techniques. Finally, we also show how such task-agnostic exploration can be used for down-stream tasks. Code and Videos are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/exploration-for-nav/.
This paper introduces PyRobot, an open-source robotics framework for research and benchmarking. PyRobot is a light-weight, high-level interface on top of ROS that provides a consistent set of hardware independent midlevel APIs to control different robots. PyRobot abstracts away details about low-level controllers and inter-process communication, and allows non-robotics researchers (ML, CV researchers) to focus on building high-level AI applications. PyRobot aims to provide a research ecosystem with convenient access to robotics datasets, algorithm implementations and models that can be used to quickly create a state-of-the-art baseline. We believe PyRobot, when paired up with low-cost robot platforms such as LoCoBot, will reduce the entry barrier into robotics, and democratize robotics. PyRobot is open-source, and can be accessed via https://pyrobot.org.
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