The Internet and Rabies

The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organization for Animal Health held a conference in Dec 2015 and started a worldwide discussion on ending the medieval horror known as rabies. Visit  http://www.oie.int/eng/RABIES2015/index.html. The Lancet carried a blog post 

http://globalhealth.thelancet.com/2015/12/09/ending-canine-mediated-human-rabies-time-now  and an editorial on the subject (its Vol. 386, Number 10012, Dec 19, 2015). The Lancet Editorial says that 70,000 people die every year because of this disease.  There is an excellent article in Quartz on the topic of rabies in India http://qz.com/487441/best-friend-turns-deadly-foe-indias-rabid-street-dogs-are-killing-thousands-every-year/

WHO says that 20,000 people die from rabies in India every year. Elsewhere, I have read that in the last ten years India has not shown any reduction in rabies deaths per year. Bangladesh, in comparison, has reduced rabies deaths by 50% in the last three years. Immunizing a dog against rabies seems to cost less than Rs 100. Why can’t India commit itself to a vast reduction in the incidence of rabies over the next three years?   

What has all this to do with the Internet, you may wonder! Please hold on for a moment and I will share my thoughts on this topic.

New ideas need to be welcomed even to fight battles we have fighting over the centuries. The following article refers to a good example of a new idea in the field: oral vaccine for animals to immunize them against rabies.  

http://triblive.com/neighborhoods/yourallekiskivalley/yourallekiskivalleymore/9420586-74/rabies-allegheny-county#axzz3vl8GiRRi

Next to the Internet! There is so much about rabies in India on the Worldwide Web. Can a few computer science students figure out a way to get actionable information out of all this? For instance, can we identify locations where there is a new cluster of rabies cases?

If this is not possible, can we use social networking to have volunteers report the location of new cases of suspected rabies? In this case, we should be able to automate the collating of received information to alert authorities and media about hotspots of rabies as they develop. It is one thing to vaccinate millions of stray dogs against rabies. It is another to vaccinate a few hundred dogs in a reported hotspot. The smart phone, with accurate location reporting, is one type of tools that can help identify hotspots to focus on.

I would suggest the person reporting a rabies case or dog bite should be free to use a variety of ways of sending information: online forms, a text message over SMS or an Internet based message system, email, an app on a smartphone, etc. A simple notation illustrated below should be enough.

report rabies case

hospital zenith hospital

name ganeshsubramanian

dateofadmission 1-1-2016

locality Jayanagar block 1

city  Bangalore

pincode 560011

(other possible types of information: town XXX, village XXX, district XXX, dateofbirth XXX, dog stray, dog pet, patient male, reportby ramani, dateofbite XXX, patient 98xxx77123; reporter should be free to send whatever information is available)

Design issues: How can we avoid treating multiple reports of a case as multiple cases? Is there a way to use multiple reports from one location to increase our confidence in the report? How can we acknowledge a reporter for his service?

  

Possible risks in using LED light to monitor your heart rate?

I had been wearing an activity tracker on my wrist to measure the number of steps I walk daily, for over a year. It has surely given me an incentive to walk more. More recently, I upgraded myself to wear the next version, which also measures my heart rate and displays it when asked to do so. I was aware that I was exposing myself to round-the-clock LED light over a few square millimeters of my skin. After a couple of months of this exposure, I noticed that the area exposed to the LEDs had developed a tan. I was surprised; having dark brown skin, I had not expected it. I looked up information given out by the manufacturer, and it said that the energy put out by the LEDs was so small it was harmless, but I was the one who had his skin in this game, literally! I wanted to be more careful.

I do not know the exact amount of energy used; suppose it is 20 milliwatts and that it is spread over two square millimeters. The energy density would then be about 10 milliwatts per square millimeter. Compare it with 140 Watts of Sunlight spread over a square foot; that is about 1.56 milliwatts/square millimeter. Besides that, I am unlikely to sit in the Sun giving me 140 Watts/square foot of radiation round-the-clock! Governments have advised people to be careful in sunbathing, to reduce the incidence of skin cancer. Visit The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent Skin Cancer. In many countries, where the weather encourages frequent sunbathing, deaths due to skin cancer exceed the number of traffic deaths.

After thinking all this out, I read the documentation again and found I could turn heart-rate monitoring on and off as I liked. Now, I keep it switched off most of the day and turn it on only during exercise sessions. I have also given up wearing the gadget during sleeping hours. You think I am paranoid? Give me a few reliable studies by credible and independent medical researchers, concluding there is no risk. I will forget my worries!

Subject to standard ethical safeguards, it may be worth doing a small-scale animal experiment exposing rats to the same HR monitor that I have been exposed to. The rats might be smarter and bite the strap off before it is too late! The experimenters might have to take some precautions.

It may be necessary to have the rats’ exposed skin examined by pathology labs to identify any possible risks from the exposure.

I would also suggest that students interested in doing the experiment to send their proposals to the manufacturers of the devices asking for a grant of 60 devices for use in the experiment. You can assure them that you will acknowledge their contributions when you publish your findings. The results might be interesting!

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Get Rid of Your Car – project ideas for students of management

For background information, you might want to read an old post of mine:

http://newstudentresearch.blogspot.com/2013/03/virtual-cars-for-everyone.html

Let me touch upon the key points from the above-mentioned blogpost, before I move on to discuss ideas for a small student project. We should each have a chauffeur driven virtual car. It should be available anywhere, anytime. Tap an app on the cell phone and optionally enter a destination and time of departure; you should have the driver calling you and turning up in a few minutes to take you where you wish to go.  This is already there, is it not? We should recognize that companies like Uber and Ola have made a significant impact on our lives in India. 

Let us look at what is not there. No one has got rid of his car! Customers have not accepted that owning cars is irrelevant as long as they can use cars whenever they want to. Society has not recognized the ongoing revolution as one that needs to be promoted through the right incentives. Lumpy “real” cars waste parking space in houses and apartment buildings, and in the places that people visit. We have not recognized the virtual car as one of the major solutions to traffic problems and atmospheric pollution. We have not visualized that it can create employment in significant numbers. We have only grudgingly accepted “taxi aggregators” as yet another enterprise and have done nothing to promote them. The issue is not one of administrative decisions; it is about the right visions for the transportation systems of the future.  

Unless society recognizes that information technology has made it unnecessary to have personal vehicles in most cases and creates the right policies to have them replaced by virtual cars, we will continue to have a moribund system of transportation. What are required are tax incentives to promote the use of shared vehicles, encouraging investments in companies providing shared vehicles, and support to employment generation for a large number of drivers. The use of shared vehicles will reduce wasteful investment in vehicles, because shared vehicles are far more productive. It will also eliminate waste of drivers’ time - private car drivers wasting their time waiting for car owners to come and occupy their cars.

Now to a student project on virtual cars:  some ideas discussed below  may be more relevant to countries where potential drivers are plentiful, but money to buy cars is relatively scarce; however, there are challenges to innovation in every country in regard to this new industry. I will offer a set of questions to trigger ideas for projects in this area:

a)   What incentives will persuade customers to give up “their own cars” in favour of virtual cars? If I am self-employed, the cost of owning and operating a car can be charged to my business expenses, saving me tax. Can we offer the same benefit to the self-employed for using virtual cars?

b)   Even employed persons can borrow money to buy cars and get tax benefits on the loan interest they pay. Can we allow customers of virtual car companies to invest in these companies to the extent of the cost of a car and get some tax benefits for that? For instance, if the virtual car operator gives them a discount of some X% because they have invested in the company, can the government treat the discount as tax-free income?

c)   How can a virtual car company deploy the investments it receives from customers to promote their own business? Can they, for instance, command a business loyalty from the customers through discounts in fares?

d)   Can the virtual car companies expand their business by offering car loans to their drivers? What role can banks pay in this regard?

e)   Can we prepare presentations to stimulate thinking in selected companies in this field?

f)    What would be right agencies to argue for suitable legislation to promote this socially relevant concept?

g)   What regulatory safeguards do we need to ensure that monopolies do not run away with the business and to protect other customer interests?

h)  What should manufacturers of electric cars do? Will the virtual car companies create and operate shared infrastructure for supporting electric cars under their control? What can the car manufacturers do to promote this? What should the government do to promote this?  

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Medical advances against diseases caused by parasites; need for follow-up

India should be grateful to scientists and medical doctors who have improved our abilities to control common diseases that are caused by parasites. This is the country in which the cause of malaria was discovered in 1897, leading to an early Nobel Prize being given to Ronald Ross (see http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/ross.html ). This year, three researchers have been honoured with the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for their work on diseases caused by parasites.

To quote from the website http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2015/

QUOTE

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2015 was divided, one half jointly to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura "for their discoveries concerning a novel therapy against infections caused by roundworm parasites" and the other half to Youyou Tu "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against Malaria".

UNQUOTE

Early work (1978) at the  Kitasato Institute and later work at the Merck Sharp and Dohme Research Laboratories has led to the discovery of the Avermectin family of drugs. The story of the Chinese work against Malaria needs a separate story of its own.

For those of us living in developing countries, the Avermectin family of drugs coming out of the work by Campbell and Omura might turn to be very valuable. Their discovery is a big step forward in our fight against disease. These drugs kill invertebrates even in small concentrations, but are basically non-poisonous to vertebrates like us. Therefore, when you take the medicine to kill off worms in your digestive tract, mosquitoes that bite you could be killed by the small amount of drug in the blood they drink from your body! Visit  http://www.malariajournal.com/content/12/1/153 and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin 

I have also read speculation that such medicines might kill the mosquitoes that spread Dengue; (Dengue is not caused by a parasite, but by viruses spread by Aedes mosquitoes). Drugs like Ivermectin might even kill bed bugs and lice as well! I remember a documentary in which the German submariners during the II World War fight the lice menace very hard! Typhus was a big threat to them!

Many manufacturers in India sell Ivermectin in retail, for something like Rs 10 per dose.

Going forward, there is need to carry out research to investigate many possibilities. I would guess that cattle must be getting poorer quality drinking water as compared to people! Anti-parasite drugs might be useful in protecting them against disease causing worms ( http://www.farmanimalhealth.co.uk/cattle-worms ). Another possibility is that we could develop relatively safer pesticides out of the Avermectin family of drugs. These would be useful in controlling common pests such as flies and cockroaches.

Sometimes, new drugs have significant social impact. The discovery of antibiotics, starting with the work of Alexander Fleming, contributed in a significant way to coping with the widow remarriage problem caused by social prejudices. Antibiotics reduced untimely deaths in India, thereby vastly reducing the number of young women losing their husbands; widow remarriage was no longer such a major problem! The victory of medical research against diseases caused by parasites and mosquitoes could have a similar effect. It could add a few years to life expectancy in developing countries; in any case, it would reduce a lot of suffering.

New tools are now becoming available to reduce the very high incidence of malnutrition among young children in India. WHO believes that de-worming can help children suffering from malnutrition. Newspapers frequently report that a high percentage of Indian children are underweight. India has taken a major initiative to free millions of children from parasitic worms. Visit http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b72d6a64-b038-11e4-a2cc-00144feab7de.html#axzz3rCnUC0WK

I will end this blog post with a question. India has an impressive number of national laboratories to carry out scientific research, but there has been no national laboratory so far for carrying out research on “tropical diseases”. Why? Is it because the millions who suffer most from them are the voiceless poor? If you are poor and lack good medical care, Dengue could pose a big risk to you; even filariasis or scabies can make your life miserable.  

A search shows that as of February 2015, the proposal to set up such a lab was awaiting the Union Health Ministry's nod! Visit

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/patna/Tropical-Disease-Research-Centre-to-be-opened-soon/articleshow/46328206.cms  It is not clear if the proposed Centre will have the resources of a national lab as and when it gets the nod.

Two other institutes are relevant in this context, even if they are small:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Ronald_Ross_Institute_of_Parasitology and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Ronald_Ross_Institute_of_Tropical_and_Communicable_Diseases

Ross was in Secunderabad at the time he succeeded in identifying the malaria parasite in a mosquito; it is appropriate that these two institutions are fairly close to Secunderabad.

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Technology for Election-related Polling

There is some statistics behind the design of exit polls; but the state of the art is rather poor. Exit polls are giving contradictory predictions about the outcome of Bihar polls, 2015. They failed to predict the landslide in favour of the Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi elections earlier.

I will offer a suggestion here for a new way of conducting exit polls. Any market research organization could easily try them out. My hope is that small experiments by students learning software technology or management would lead the way and lead to publishable R & D.

The basic premise is that a high percentage of voters have a cell phone. This is not entirely true, but we will return to that question later. Assume that the polling organization (call it pollster) offers during a national election handsome prizes like a hundred airline tickets to a holiday destination, a thousand gift coupons, and ten thousand brand-name pens. To qualify for a prize, you need to send an SMS within five hours of a poll closing, from the constituency concerned, using a cell phone registered in that constituency, giving the constituency name and the party you predict will win there. The polling computer will allow each cell phone to cast only one vote. Now comes the second premise: that you will most likely predict that the party you voted for will win. We assume that you did not waste your vote for a party you expected to lose. You reflect your own belief as well as those of the people who influence you by their conversations. We assume that political parties will not waste much effort in falsifying an exit poll as that confers no real benefits on them.

That is the basic idea. What would be cost-effectiveness of the idea, how can it be improved, can it be modified to serve other information collecting functions, etc., are good questions for students (and others) to examine. We also need to examine privacy issues involved and whether cell phone companies analyze the text messages they carry.

I would like to add another idea, to encourage voters to participate in the exit polls. The computer could randomly select a specified small fraction of the participants within a few minutes of receiving their text messages and send them a message like this: “You have been selected to receive a ----- if the party you have indicated wins in the constituency you have named. Prize winners are selected by a computer which uses random numbers to make fair selections”. This will increase the confidence of the participants that fair practices are in use.  

Finally, a word on my basic premise. Will the people at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid really have proper representation in a technology-based poll? No. This is a matter worth considering.  

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Using solar power through an UPS

(This is a small project, but one that should be carried out with responsibility. Do the work only under the supervision of Electrical Engg Department Staff in your college/university Lab).

  

Solar panel prices are coming down but if you include the cost of batteries and solar panels, they are expensive. Products are available in India from a few vendors, but they are not priced like commodity items.  On the other hand, common UPS units are available at commodity prices. They incorporate a battery and inverter and come with power cables, plugs & sockets, all ready for use. The project suggested here is one of connecting a solar panel (SP) providing about twenty or thirty watts of power for a few hours a day to an UPS of the type used with a PC. The schematic below illustrates the idea.

 

A solar panel with a nominal rating of 30 W seems ideal for charging a UPS of the type discussed above. The SP needs only to provide a DC output at the voltage of the UPS battery, which is usually 12 V.  The charge controller has to prevent reverse flow of current and prevent over-charging.  The typical UPS used with PCs has a 600 VA rating and has capacity of about seven Ampere hours (Ah). That provides for a nominal 84 Watt hour (Wh) energy storage. Assuming that we do not want to utilize more than 50% of the nominal capacity before recharging, such a device can deliver 40 Wh per day, enough to power a 5W LED lamp for 6 hours a day and to provide a few Watt hours to charge one or two cell phones. In fact, some UPS vendors offer models with built-in USB sockets that will charge most cell phones. 

The Solar Panel

Those interested in understanding sizing calculations would find the website http://www.batterystuff.com/  quite useful.  The site http://www.wholesalesolar.com/solar-information/charge-controller-article gives some information on the working of a charge controller. ICs for use in building a charge controller are available from vendors such as Texas Instruments.  I would urge students interested in this project to read about the risks of continuing to draw current from a battery when its voltage has fallen below a specified safe level, such as 11.6 V in case of 12 V batteries. Precautions should be taken to avoid under-voltage operation. One way of ensuring this is to build the system around an UPS that provides protection against under-voltage operation.

Social and Economic implications

The LED revolution has made small size solar installations attractive. Five hours lighting per day through a 5 W LED and a cell phone charger working round the clock would be a boon to most rural households. A solar UPS can provide this even without traditional electrification, but benefits from it if available. It makes it easier to live with power-cuts. Lighting based on a solar UPS confers significant advantages to small shops. Remote locations can use solar UPS units to provide some street lighting. Rural hospitals would find reliable lighting very valuable.  This article has had a focus on systems providing power in the range of 5 to 10 W; however, the future will see surging demand for units with higher capacities. At a macro-level, the UPS market in India is already worth several thousand crores of rupees per year; but it largely serves urban customers. Hybrid UPS units that can use traditional electrical supply as well as solar energy are practically absent in rural areas. The technology for putting them together exists and is relatively easy to master. This segment alone is likely to grow into a few thousand crores per year business within a few years. In the early stages, pioneering engineers will put together their own products and provide services. Within a few years, we can expect that small hybrid units will roll off big production lines and be available at commodity prices. The pioneers will see their business continuing to grow despite such mass manufacture, as long as they are present in rural locations to handle retail sales and to provide services.

Apart from providing reliable lighting, this industry will create several hundred thousand jobs all over the country.

Srinivasan Ramani