Category: General Interest

Items of general interest – for mass consumption

Seatbelts Save Lives

This blog post is a great article on why you should wear seat belts. Although the general idea is well known, this post goes into so much detail of what happens when you don’t wear a seat belt, that hopefully it will scare some more people into complying.

In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That’s the second collision. That body’s internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments—and that’s where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when the bowling ball you left on the rear deck hits you in the back of the head, because that continued at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.

You definitely need to read the whole post. It goes on and on in this vein. If nothing else, it is very medically informative.

Over the years, on multiple occassions my friends or acquaintances have been involved in accidents were some of the occupants of the car were not wearing seatbelts and had very serious injuries (and in some cases, died). But people in the same accident who were wearing seatbelts walked off with minor injuries. I have myself driven my car head-on into an immovable object at 120kmph on the Pune-Bombay highway. My car suffered to the tune of 1 lakh rupees. I walked off without any injuries.

As the article points out, in many places, wearing a seatbelt is now required by law. Non-compliance is punishable by a small fine in some cases, and in other cases, death.

(I found the article from this Boing-boing post.)

The antibiotic before penicillin

Most of us think that penicillin was the first antibiotic, but Ashutosh gives us the story of sulfa which ushered in the “first herioc age age of antibiotics”. The post is actually a review of “The Demon Under the Microscope” a book by Thomas Hager which hopes to popularize this forgotten but extremely important story.

But at the time, there were almost no laws that required manufacturers to list such petty things as solvents on their bottles. The FDA was a skimpy and ineffectual agency at the time, with a few dozen agents scuttling around to mainly keep a check on excessive profit making. After the sulfa-ethylene glycol concoction was sold, a wave of death began that did not stop until several hundred people died, and public outrage changed the face of the FDA- and the way in which drugs are developed, manufactured and sold in the US- forever. After the tragedy, the FDA acquired new powers that it could have only dreamt of before. Of course, it took the thalidomide tragedy to have the kind of strict FDA regime that we have today, but the sulfa tragedy started it all, and made drugs substantially safer for the public.

Its an interesting article full of little interesting factoids. Long but worth reading.
Link.

India’s biotech industry emerging as world innovator, collaborator, competitor

A Canadian research paper submitted a few days back is reporting that India’s biotech industry is all set to emerge as a major global player buiding on cost efficiencies, innovation, and collaboration according to this interesting article.
The research points out standard stuff you would expect: for example, how Shantha Biotechnics of Hyderabad uses innovative and efficient manufacturing processes to produce a Hep-B vaccine at $0.50. This used to cost $15 earlier.

But it also points out other aspects that are more interesting. For example, the existence Indian “contract research organizations” which do specific research for and under the guidance of major western companies. Or that the Serum Institute of India in Pune supplies products to 138 different countries and claims to immunize half of the world’s children against several diseases.

But the paper also points out the danger that the Indian companies will focus too much on the lucrative western markets and neglect local illnesses and issues for which there is a pressing need to develop effective drugs locally. Historically, Indian companies have been the principal providers of vaccines and medicines for the major local killers like malaria and tuberculosis. And if these companies start producing Viagra, who will cater to the TB patients?

Read full article.