Vijay Shankar Balakrishnan
Journalist, Writer, and Podcaster
Reports & writes on science, health, environment, technology and the sociology of all these both in print & online platforms with multimedia and data graphics whenever possible. Founder of BookPodia.
PROJECTS
The Lancet
HIV criminalisation laws in the USA: built on phobias or facts?
Just when high income countries were starting to see the positive impact of the use of antibiotics to tackle infectious diseases, reports on AIDS in the 1980s as a infectious disease first appearing within gay communities posed a new public health challenge. Since then, AIDS has been proclaimed as a divine punishment for non-normative social behaviours such as drug abuse, prostitution, and gay sex. In the 1980s in the USA, some religious factions and politicians began terrifying people, demon...
The Lancet
The changing face of tuberculosis care in Russia
In December, 2017, Tereza Kasaeva, deputy director of medical care at the Russian Ministry of Health (MoH), was appointed as the new Director of the WHO Global TB Programme; a move that caused some controversy. Citing Russia's perceived record of poor tuberculosis management, a lack of transparency in the recruitment process, and queries about Kasaeva's expertise, opponents called on WHO to justify the appointment. The scepticism was echoed in an editorial published in The Lancet. However, th...
The Lancet
Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke
Neuroanatomist and pioneer in rehabilitation therapy after spinal cord injuries. Born in San Francisco, California, USA on 15 October, 1859, she died on November 5, 1927 in Paris, France, aged 68 years.
When Augusta Dejerine-Klumpke examined a patient in 1885 with an injured brachial plexus—the complex set of nerves bridging the neck to the shoulders—little did she know that he would set her on the scientific path for which she is most well known. With an ophthalmoscope, she saw the patient's...
bioengineeringtoday.org
Artificial Intelligence May Help Doctors Screen Diabetics for Eye Disorders
Diabetic retinopathy, often abbreviated DR, is a preventable blinding disease that affects about one-third of all people with diabetes mellitus worldwide. To screen patients for the disease, eye doctors take pictures of patients’ retinas and score abnormal changes. But this requires expensive retinal cameras and highly trained eye specialists -- not to mention the waiting list for an appointment with one.
Two recent studies, from Australia and India, want to rewrite this practice. Both aim to...
bioengineeringtoday.org
New Stretchable Electronics For Better Ultrasound Imaging
Imagine sitting in the doctor’s office with a sprained elbow. Your doctor may order an ultrasound to evaluate your injury, but since ultrasound probes are rigid, it is often difficult to scan the irregular topography of someone's elbow, and the ultrasound may miss details critical for an accurate diagnosis. Applying special gels can help the ultrasound probe to maintain better contact with the surface, but it is often still not good enough.
A new flexible ultrasound electronic patch may soon ...
bioengineeringtoday.org
Tapping Tumor Physics Advances Lung Cancer Prognosis in CT Imaging
Computer tomography, or CT, has advanced cancer care by helping doctors visualize solid tumors. But in lung cancers, the tumors are often in different material states, and those states can determine the type and severity of malignancy they give rise to. This poses diagnostic challenges in imaging-based care.
Solid lung tumors are largely composed of tumor cells and blood vessels, while subsolid ones also have air pockets within the tumor, as well as fluid mucous within and around. Conventiona...
bioengineeringtoday.org
Whole Body Imaging Sheds Light on the Success of Lung Cancer Therapy
Non-small cellular lung cancer (NSCLC) is a debilitating form of lung cancer. It killed about 160,000 Americans in 2013 and accounts for about 14 percent of new cancer cases reported each year in the U.S. Doctors label it a chemotherapy rebel since it does not often yield to drugs.
One of the challenges in treating NSCLC is predicting patients’ response to therapy, both before beginning it and during early treatment. Current monitoring practice relies on blood tests and biopsies to look for g...
bioengineeringtoday.org
Whole Body Imaging May Help Researchers Understand Why Heart Attack Survivors Have Cognitive Impairment
When doctors treat patients for heart attack, they usually do not think about the patient’s brain. However, several studies have shown some heart attack survivors can have problems with cognitive functions, such as memory and attention, more frequently than their healthy counterparts.
“This clearly requires more insightful research to understand the mechanism of interaction between cardiac and brain dysfunctions,” said Frank Bengel, a nuclear medicine specialist at the Hannover Medical School...
The Lancet
The birth of consciousness: I think, therefore I am?
Consciousness is an elusive concept, and efforts towards understanding it or its evolution oscillate between philosophy and neuroscience—between thought experiments and measurable tests of brain activity. Consequently, philosophers and scientists are continually coming up with new theories on why or how they think that the physical brain can bring the metaphysical mind into being. In American philosopher Daniel Dennett's latest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: Evolution of Minds, he gran...
dw.com
What is the future of animal testing?
For Jo Neill, her workday doesn't end without paying a visit to her lab rats. A professor of psychopharmacology at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, Neill finds her field of research to depend upon those rats.
Neill injects her animals with a chemical and observes their learning and memory behaviors. She will only get approval from regulators to test the chemical on humans if it benefits her rats, which are ailing from her experimental imitation of a form of human schizophre...
bioengineeringtoday.org
First National Database of Cardiac Ultrasound Studies Could Help Improve Care
Cardiologists across the United States use a variety of techniques to image heart function, from ultrasound to cardiac catheterization. However, the results from these techniques do not always point to a prognosis in line with patient symptoms, leading to a potentially low quality of imaging-based patient care.
To improve the situation, the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) has come up with ImageGuideEcho, the first registry for cardiologists specializing in ultrasound imaging of the...
The Lancet
In Shock: a book about compassion in the emergency department
On a spring evening about 10 years ago, Rana Awdish experienced intense abdominal pain while dining with a friend. Soon she was rushed to ... // This article is available free of charge. Simply login to access the full article, or register for free if you do not yet have a username and password.
dw.com
Can 'carbon law' help businesses save the climate?
You may never have heard of carbon law — it has nothing to do with the legal system. But the obscure principle seems to be gaining momentum as businesses try to take the lead in a low-carbon economy.
dw.com
Bioeconomy: A global trend?
Against a backdrop of refineries and a tall chimney, hills of woodchips welcome visitors to the Äänekoski Metsä bioproduct mill in central Finland, the largest mill of its kind in the Northern Hemisphere. In fact, it's more than a mill — it's a whole ecosystem of companies that turn a profit from birch, pine and spruce logs trucked in daily from sustainably managed forests around the country.
The Lancet
Germany's delayed coal phase-out and respiratory health
At the time of writing in January, 2018, Germany is in a phase of unprecedented political uncertainty. Months after the general election in September, 2017, it is still unclear who will form the next government. However, after the green party and liberal Free Democratic Party quit coalition negotiations in autumn 2017, the ongoing talks between factions of two conservative parties—the Christian Democratic Union and the Christian Social Union—and the Social Democratic Party hint towards a poss...