RABIES: a neglected disease that perpetuates poverty.

 RABIES: a neglected disease that perpetuates poverty.

Rabies is recognized as one of 20 Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) by the World Health Organization.

Although rabies is found on every continent, except Antarctica and some islands, it is well controlled or even eliminated in most developed countries. Today over 95% of human victims are from Africa and Asia, most from marginalized and impoverished rural communities. 

 Rabies is a preventable disease that overwhelmingly afflicts the poor, both in terms of its death toll and the associated financial burden. Annual economic losses because of the disease are around 8.6 billion US dollars, mostly due to premature deaths, but also because of spending on human vaccines, lost income for victims of animal bites, and other costs. 

 With a survival rate of less than 0.1%, those exposed to the virus face a stark choice: go in search of a series of vaccines and immunoglobulin that prevent the onset of the disease (post-exposure prophylaxis, PEP) or die. In some cases, PEP costs more than the monthly household income, and families are known to either go into debt to pay for PEP, or sell livestock on which they depend for income; both are options that negatively affect families’ future prospects. Rabies can destroy families literally (through death), emotionally, and financially – making it a truly horrific disease.

   Rabies survivor !!!

COVID-19 : HOW TO REDUCE STRESS IN DOGS.

          COVID-19 : HOW TO REDUCE STRESS IN DOGS. 

 The best ways to help your dog have a better quality of life is to reduce the amount of stress she experiences.
The first step is to make as complete a list as possible of everything that is stressful for her. This includes mild stressors as well as the most significant ones.

 Stressors are like building blocks that push your dog beyond her ability to cope with her environment; eliminating even the milder ones can help keep her below that threshold.

               Here are few strategies  to reduce stress:

Elimination.: This means getting rid of the stressor altogether.. Stop yelling at your dog. Throw the shock collar away. Teach her cooperative care so there is no need for forced restraint professionals so as not.allow inappropriate interactions from any friends, visitors, or family members.

 Counter-conditioning. This involves changing your dog’s association with the thing she finds stressful by associating it with something wonderful (such as delicious pieces of roasted chicken).

This process is gradual and you must be sure to keep the intensity of the stimulus below threshold – so the dog sees it (or hears it) and is aware of it but isn’t stressed.  The goal is to convince her that other dogs ,children, men, or sounds are wonderful because they make bits of chicken appear.

 Indoor Games to Engage: Your Dog's Brain When You Can't Go Out. As corona virus confinement stretches on, dogs and humans are getting  stressed by the day from lack of exercise, While there are limits to the physical exercise you two can do while shut-in, there are many indoor dog games you can enjoy together such as cognition games, and playing with interactive toys. 

New Stardew Valley Expansion Allows Player To Shoot Self In Barn After Family Farm Bankrupted By Corporate Agribusiness..

New Stardew Valley Expansion Allows Player To Shoot Self In Barn After Family Farm Bankrupted By Corporate Agribusiness. While adding multiple new gameplay options and challenging story paths to their retro farming RPG Stardew Valley, developer Chucklefish Limited revealed Friday that an upcoming game expansion would allow players to shoot themselves in the barn after losing their farm to corporate agribusiness. “Stardew Valley’s latest update includes all kinds of fun new farm life challenges, including collecting minerals to restore your grandfather’s old shotgun, which you can then use to chase off the bank officials who come to foreclose on your land or even place in your character’s mouth and pull the trigger after you realize you’ve lost everything,” more

Pokémon Go launches in Japan and servers immediately crash.

Nintendo has finally launched Pokémon Go in Japan, the birthplace of the now ubiquitous game – but the already unstable servers appear to have crashed under all the weight. Niantic Labs, the developers behind the game, announced it was "finally broadcasting" in Japan. The game was first released on July 6 in the US, Australia and New Zealand and has been rolling out globally since. The Japanese launch was reportedly delayed as it firmed up a sponsorship deal with McDonald's. Japanese site Excite News reports the fast food chain is partnering with Pokémon Go developer. Read more

‘Pokémon Go’ player saves dog in need of veterinary attention.

An unexpected, real-life adventure unfolded for two women playing the popular new mobile game Pokémon Go. While waiting for a pizza they’d ordered to be delivered, Kaitlin Kouts and Tiffany Revay took out their phones and set about their Lufkin, Texas, neighborhood searching for an elusive Jigglypuff in the augmented reality game. What they found instead was an injured puppy in need of veterinary care. The pair told reporters that when they came across the puppy, he appeared to be in pain and was bleeding from the mouth. They looked for his guardian, but no one knew where the dog had come from. As the two were busy searching for answers and help, they received a phone call from their pizza deliverer, Skyler Jerke, who wound up playing an important role in saving this puppy. Read

Diet Dash game uses brain training to help you lose weight.

The app turns dieting into a game to make it easier to make healthy food choices.Losing weight can often be a struggle, and is rarely fun, but that could be about to change. Researchers from Drexel University are developing a gaming app they think could help people "control unhealthy eating habits and ultimately lose weight". The app, which would be in the form of a computer game, is designed to improve inhibitory control - the part of the brain that "stops you from giving into unhealthy cravings". The game, DietDash, requires participants to tell researchers which types of unhealthy foods they are most likely to binge on. The game will then be customized to their diet; if someone lists cookies as their favourite treat, for example, cookies will appear in the game. Players are then asked to press certain keys to respond to different types of foods, including healthy and unhealthy foods. "As the player's inhibitory control improves, the game speed increases". People are expected to play the game for eight minutes a day for six weeks. Another app will attempt to intelligently detect patterns in a person's eating habits. "When users are likely to slip from their dietary plans, the app provides tailored strategies to put them back on track," researchers said. "Millions of people are trying to lose weight, and they are going about it in a reasonable way - by trying to reduce calories," said Evan Forman, who will be leading the study. "But you're going to slip from your diet plan. That pretty much happens to everyone. You could say the secret of helping people actually lose weight is preventing these lapses, so we concentrated on how to best do that." "The study is really the first to attempt to train people for weeks in a row," Forman said. "We think this can translate to real-world behaviours, because just like any task, it improves with practice." The university is now seeking participants to trial the app. Contributed by Wired.

Super bugs,games and antibiotic resistance.

A new game aims to raise awareness of the growing threat of superbugs - antibiotic-resistant bacteria that could cause serious health problems for humanity in the near future. Developed by Preloaded, Superbugs puts players in charge of battling rapidly mutating bacteria in a Petri dish. As cells replicate, you administer doses of antibiotics to wipe them out, leaving only the resistant red cells. Gameplay consists of keeping the dish clear, while a timer counts down on new drug research to wipe out the stronger strains. Chillingly, given the game is meant to mirror the real-world battle against superbugs, defeat is inevitable, as bacteria multiplies and mutates faster than research - or you, as the player - can keep up with. The mobile game launches in partnership with the Longitude Prize, a five-year challenge with a £10 million prize fund which aims to solve the problem of global antibiotic resistance. Make no mistake, this is a major challenge facing the world's healthcare authorities. At the end of 2015, bacteria resistant to colistin were discovered. As colistin is considered a "last resort" for treatment of strains that have grown immune to other antibiotics, this is a significant problem. Without constant research and development of new drugs, some projections forecast up to 10m deaths per year by 2050. "We know our daily behaviours - like sharing and overusing antibiotics - can lead to bacteria becoming drug-resistant, so it's really important we increase awareness around this huge issue," said Longitude Prize spokesperson Tamar Ghosh. "It's especially important to reach young people and games like this are a fantastic way of doing that." Superbugs, available now for Android and iOS devices, is aimed at improving basic scientific understanding of how bacteria mutate and become drug-resistant, while reinforcing how small changes in human behaviour - such as proper consumption of prescribed antibiotics - can slow their spread. Superbugs takes the complex science behind the spread of antibiotic resistance in bacteria and models it as a casual mobile game that's not only great fun to play but scientifically sound," said Phil Stuart, Creative Director of Preloaded. "Games are the perfect medium to reach millions of people and make complex ideas understandable." The Longitude Prize launched in 2014, seeking ideas on how to tackle the rise of drug-resistant bacteria - ideally, "a diagnostic tool that can rule out antibiotic use or help identify an effective antibiotic to treat a patient." While Superbugs alone won't do that, the hope is it gets more people thinking about the problem - and a solution. Contributed by wired.co.uk

How thousands of gamers are helping to decode the human body.

EVE Online isn't just a game about internet spaceships and sci-fi politics. Since March, developer CCP Games has been running Project Discovery – an initiative to help improve scientific understanding of the human body at the tiniest levels. Run in conjunction with the Human Protein Atlas and Massively Multiplayer Online Science, the project taps into EVE Online's greatest resource – its player base – to help categorize millions of proteins. "We show them an image, and they can change the color of it, putting green or red dyes on it to help them analyse it a little bit better," Linzi Campbell, game designer on Project Discovery, tells WIRED. "Then we also show them examples – cytoplasm is their favourite one! We show them what each of the different images should look like, and just get them to pick a few that they identify within the image. The identifications are scrambled each time, so it's not as simple as going 'ok, every time I just pick the one on the right' – they have to really think about it." The analysis project is worked into EVE Online as a minigame, and works within the context of the game's lore. "We have this NPC organisation called the Drifters – they're like a mysterious entity in New Eden [EVE's interplanetary setting]," Campbell explains. "The players don't know an awful lot about the Drifters at the minute, so we disguised it within the universe as Drifter DNA that they were analysing. I think it just fit perfectly. We branded this as [research being done by] the Sisters of Eve, and they're analyzing this Drifter DNA." The response has been tremendous. "We've had an amazing number of classifications, way over our greatest expectations," says Emma Lundberg, associate professor at the Human Protein Atlas. "Right now, after six weeks, we've had almost eight million classifications, and the players spent 16.2 million minutes playing the minigame. When we did the math, that translated – in Swedish measures – to 163 working years. It's crazy." "We had a little guess, internally. We said if we get 40,000+ classifications a day, we're happy. If we get 100,000 per day, then we're amazed," Lundberg adds. "But when it peaked in the beginning, we had 900,000 classifications in one day. Now it's stabilised, but we're still getting around 200,000 a day, so everyone is mind-blown. We never expected it." Currently, EVE players are going through images from Lundberg's domain, who serves as director for the sub-cellular chapter of the atlas. It took players just three weeks to get through the entire workload, and are now engaging in a second pass for veracity, with no signs of interest dropping. "Part of the problem with the gamification of science is that participation rapidly drops and that's what we hoped we could prevent by doing it in an existing game, with rewards," says Lundberg. "I think that's the biggest difference, that it's integrated into the game." The Human Protein Atlas itself is expanding on the mapping of the human genome, but at a much smaller level. "We have about 20,000 genes and right now we haven't even proven that more than 70 per cent even exist. So there's a big gap between protein research and DNA research, and there are several reasons for that," says Lundberg. "DNA you can amplify so it's easy to study, but you can't amplify proteins. Also, as all cells have the same DNA, you can [just] take a blood sample [to look at]. But proteins, that's the genes that are expressed, vary through the body. You have to cover the whole body and so it's a lot more difficult, from a technological point of view, to study proteins," she continues. "From my point of view, that's the interesting part – proteins are the molecules that perform the function, and drugs act by targeting proteins. So if you want to develop better drugs, understand how humans work, or understand biology, you have to know what the proteins are doing." Players' efforts will soon be felt in the wider scientific field too. After verifying their categorisations and analyses – a process involving control images that researchers know are correct, used to measure performance of the EVE hivemind – their findings are incorporated into the HPA's database. All data is publicly available, and the atlas has around 100,000 monthly users. Already, an average of two peer-reviewed scientific papers are published every day, and when the next version of the atlas is published in December, future papers will incorporate the EVE players' data. culled from wired.co.uk

GOOGLE CARDBOARD VR HEADSET

Virtual reality has taken over in various fields such as medicine, tourism,entertainment,military and education, creating a totally new experience. The fun has begun,join in get your headsets. It's taken almost two years for Google's low-cost VR headset to arrive in the UK, having launched in the US in June 2014. It can be purchased from the Google Store with an estimated dispatch time of 1-2 business days. Anyone who wants to buy two Google Cardboards can order a bundle for £25. Announced in 2014, Google Cardboard has shipped over five million units to date. The idea is simple: it's a no-frills enclosure that transforms a phone into a basic VR headset. Since the launch of Cardboard, Google has focused on releasing more VR content and there are thousands of VR apps and games to download from the Android store. YouTube also now hosts a selection of 360-degree videos. Having set up a virtual reality division in January 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that beyond "early efforts" there would be "a lot more from us and our partners in 2016". read more Wired.com

PETS AND COMPUTER GAMES.

Dr Bronwen Slack, is Meep's owner and vet operations coordinator at PETstock, she believes that people dont spend enough time with their pets. She believes anything that encourages people to interact with their cats, so they're not living such a sedentary lifestyle, is good. Meep lives the typical life of an indulged pet in Melbourne – he has a loving owner who showers him with attention, plenty of toys and a pantry full of food. He also has several games on a Samsung tablet to play. Computer games for pets is the latest in the continuing trend of dogs and cats being elevated from family pet to "furry babies". After all, why should humans have all the fun playing Candy Crush.It's not that balls of yarn and ropes are too analogue for today's 21st-century pets, rather there's now an alternative way to increase simulation among cats and dogs particularly when they're home alone. Marcus Carter, research fellow in computers at the University of Melbourne, says the "interesting trend" reflects the lifestyles of many people, and likens digital games to the increasing use of "pet cams" to monitor them. Marcus recently got a puppy and set up Skype to automatically answer so he could check on her while at work the first few times I left her in the back yard.He believes digital systems in general present an amazing opportunity to improve animal welfare, such as by reducing social isolation in the home. The games are simple, encouraging dogs and cats (and even very young children) to catch a series of slow moving digital fish, bubbles, treats and any other number of small creatures or lasers. One reviewer of the imaginatively titled "Game for Dogs" in the App store wrote: "My dog is now obsessed and is biting cause all she wants to do is play it on the iPad." Dr Slack tends to use the games sporadically so as not to over stimulate them. The best way to use them is when leaving the house to go on an errand and I want to keep the pet occupied while away. for 15 or 20 minutes. read more http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/pet-gamers-cats-and-dogs-the-latest-family-members-to-play-tablet-games-20160408-go1wb7.html