Heavenly Angel...

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa (26 August 1910 – 5 September 1997), born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, was a Catholic nun of Albanian ethnicity and Indian citizenship,who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India in 1950. For over 45 years she ministered to the poor, sick, orphaned, and dying, while guiding the Missionaries of Charity's expansion, first throughout India and then in other countries. Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

Early life

   Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Gonxhe meaning "rosebud" in Albanian) was born on 26 August 1910, in Üsküb, Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, capital of the Republic of Macedonia). Although she was born on 26 August, she considered 27 August, the day she was baptized, to be her "true birthday." She was the youngest of the children of a family from Shkodër, Albania, born to Nikollë and Drana Bojaxhiu.[8] Her father, who was involved in Albanian politics, died in 1919 when she was eight years old. After her father's death, her mother raised her as a Roman Catholic. Her father's origin was possibly from Prizren, Kosovo while her mother's origin was possibly from a village near Gjakova, Kosovo.

According to a biography by Joan Graff Clucas, in her early years Agnes was fascinated by stories of the lives of missionaries and their service, and by age 12 was convinced that she should commit herself to a religious life.She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary. She never again saw her mother or sister. Agnes initially went to the Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Ireland to learn English, the language the Sisters of Loreto used to teach school children in India. She arrived in India in 1929, and began her novitiate in Darjeeling, near the Himalayan mountains. She took her first religious vows as a nun on 24 May 1931. At that time she chose the name Teresa after Thérèse de Lisieux, the patron saint of missionaries. She took her solemn vows on 14 May 1937, while serving as a teacher at the Loreto convent school in eastern Calcutta.   Although Teresa enjoyed teaching at the school, she was increasingly disturbed by the poverty surrounding her in Calcutta.The Bengal famine of 1943 brought misery and death to the city; and the outbreak of Hindu/Muslim violence in August 1946 plunged the city into despair and horror.

Missionaries of Charity

     On 10 September 1946, Teresa experienced what she later described as "the call within the call" while traveling to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling from Calcutta for her annual retreat. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith." She began her missionary work with the poor in 1948, replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton sari decorated with a blue border, adopted Indian citizenship, and ventured out into the slums. Initially she started a school in Motijhil; soon she started tending to the needs of the destitute and starving. Her efforts quickly caught the attention of Indian officials, including the prime minister, who expressed his appreciation.

   Teresa received Vatican permission on 7 October 1950 to start the diocesan congregation that would become the Missionaries of Charity. Its mission was to care for, in her own words, "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone." It began as a small order with 13 members in Calcutta; today it has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices and charity centers worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless, and victims of floods, epidemics, and famine.

    In 1952 Mother Teresa opened the first Home for the Dying in space made available by the city of Calcutta. With the help of Indian officials she converted an abandoned Hindu temple into the Kalighat Home for the Dying, a free hospice for the poor. She renamed it Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart (Nirmal Hriday). Those brought to the home received medical attention and were afforded the opportunity to die with dignity, according to the rituals of their faith; Muslims were read the Quran, Hindus received water from the Ganges, and Catholics received the Last Rites."A beautiful death," she said, "is for people who lived like animals to die like angels—loved and wanted." Mother Teresa soon opened a home for those suffering from Hansen's disease, commonly known as leprosy, and called the hospice Shanti Nagar (City of Peace).The Missionaries of Charity also established several leprosy outreach clinics throughout Calcutta, providing medication, bandages and food.

Reception in India

   Mother Teresa had first been recognised by the Indian government more than a third of a century earlier when she was awarded the Padma Shri in 1962. She continued to receive major Indian rewards in successive decades including, in 1972, the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding and, in 1980, India's highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna.

Water water everywhere…

    While the flood waters of a swollen Yamuna has entered many parts of Delhi and the streets were flooded leading to massive traffic snarls, farmers from UP have reached Delhi to gherao Parliament on Thursday over poor compensation given for acquiring land for the Yamuna Express highway. The farmers' march is likely to throw traffic out of gear even as security has been tightened.

   Major rivers like the Ganga, Yamuna and Satluj were in spate, threatening to overflow their banks and prompting authorities in various states to issue an alert.Many areas in the Punjab, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar belt were threatened as river waters rose alarmingly and officials rushed in to evacuate people most at danger.

   In Uttar Pradesh, at least seven eastern districts were affected as water levels rose in the Ganga, Yamuna, Ghaghra, Saryu and Rapti rivers. Lakhs of people in Ballia, Bahraich, Maharajganj, Lakhimpur Kheri, Gonda, Barabanki and Faizabad were hit and many had to be evacuated.Thousands of hectares of agricultural land were flooded, officials in Lucknow said, adding that the PAC (provincial armed constabulary) was being pressed into service.

"The government has ordered necessary steps to be taken for evacuation of flood affected population to safer areas," said an official, adding that Chief Minister Mayawati had issued a warning that no laxity on the part of any official dealing with the flood situation would be tolerated.
In Bihar, floodwaters entered over 200 villages and threatened to inundate many others. The most vulnerable areas were Bettiah, Muzaffarpur and Darbhanga districts.
    Besides, dozens of villages in Bagaha district were inundated after embankments were breached at several places and water levels rose in all the major rivers following heavy rains in the state and the catchment areas of Nepal. "All the rivers are in full spate following heavy rains. Some rivers may cross the red mark late Wednesday or Thursday," an official said.

   "Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has directed officials to remain extra vigilant as the eastern afflux bund, which breached at Kushaha in 2008, is again under pressure due to heavy discharge in Kosi," an official in the Chief Minister's Office here told IANS. The Yamuna threatened the national capital as well as the city of the Taj Mahal, Agra. In Delhi, a key bridge over the Yamuna linking the capital with its populous eastern district was shut Wednesday as the river waters rose menacingly, causing huge traffic jams.

Authorities said the Yamuna was flowing above the danger mark for the fifth consecutive day, with officials warning that its level was expected to rise further.

The water level has touched 205.92 metres and could go up, an official of the Irrigation and Flood Control Department told IANS here. The river had crossed the danger level of 204.8 metres late Friday. The threat of floods also loomed large over Agra with authorities sounding a danger alert and advising people to move out as the water level was rising every hour.
"As the rain continues in Punjab and Haryana, we expect Yamuna to touch the danger mark," a Water Works official said.Water has entered fields in Bateshwar, in Vrindavan and parts of Mathura district.

A traffic jam 100 km long and 10 days old

Believe it or not: A traffic jam that's entered 10th day! Stretches 100km; may take as long as mid-Sept to clear

Beijing: China has just been declared the world's second biggest economy, and now it has a monster traffic jam to match. Triggered by road construction, the snarl-up began 10 days ago and was 100 kilometers (60 miles) long at one point. Reaching almost to the outskirts of Beijing, traffic still creeps along in fits and starts, and the crisis could last for another three weeks, authorities say.It's a metaphor for a nation that sometimes chokes on its own breakneck growth.

 In the worst-hit stretches of the road in northern China, drivers pass the time sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors. Many of the trucks that carry fruit and vegetables are unrefrigerated, and the cargoes are assumed to be rotting.On Sunday, the eighth day of the near-standstill, trucks moved just over a kilometer (less than a mile) on the worst section, said Zhang Minghai, a traffic director in Zhangjiakou, a city about 150 kilometers (90 miles) northwest of Beijing. China Central Television reported Tuesday that some vehicles had been stuck for five days.

     No portable toilets were set up along the highway, leaving only two apparent options -- hike to a service area or into the fields. But there were no reports of violent road rage, and the main complaint heard from drivers was about villagers on bicycles making a killing selling boxed lunches, bottled water to drink and heated water for noodles.

A bottle of water was selling for 10 yuan ($1.50), 10 times the normal price, Chinese media reports said.
The traffic jam built up on the Beijing-Tibet highway, on a section that links the capital to the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. The main reason traffic has increased on this partially four-lane highway is the opening of coal mines in the northwest, vital for the booming economy that this month surpassed Japan's in size and is now second only to America's

The super bug

Antibiotic resistance        

   Antibiotic resistance is a type of drug resistance where a microorganism is able to survive exposure to an antibiotic. Genes can be transferred between bacteria in a horizontal fashion by conjugation, transduction, or transformation. Thus a gene for antibiotic resistance which had evolved via natural selection may be shared. Evolutionary stress such as exposure to antibiotics then selects for the antibiotic resistant trait. Many antibiotic resistance genes reside on plasmids, facilitating their transfer. If a bacterium carries several resistance genes, it is called multiresistant or, informally, a superbug.

In medicine

The volume of antibiotic prescribed is the major factor in increasing rates of bacterial resistance rather than compliance with antibiotics. A single dose of antibiotics leads to a greater risk of resistant organisms to that antibiotic in the person for up to a year

Inappropriate prescribing of antibiotics has been attributed to a number of causes including: people who insist on antibiotics, physicians simply prescribe them as they feel they do not have time to explain why they are not necessary, physicians who do not know when to prescribe antibiotics or else are overly cautious for medical legal reasons.A third of people for example believe that antibiotics are effective for the common cold and 22% of people do not finish a course of antibiotics primarily due to that fact that they feel better (varying from 10% to 44% depending on the country. Compliance with once daily antibiotics is better than with twice daily antibiotics. Sub optimum antibiotic concentrations in critically ill people increase the frequency of antibiotic resistance organisms. While taking antibiotics doses less than those recommended may increase rates of resistance, shortening the course of antibiotics may actually decrease rates of resistance.

Poor hand hygiene by hospital staff has been associated with the spread of resistant organisms and an increase in hand washing compliance results in decreased rates of these organisms.

Prevention

Rational use of antibiotics may reduce the chances of development of opportunistic infection by antibiotic-resistant bacteria due to dysbacteriosis. In one study the use of fluoroquinolones are clearly associated with Clostridium difficile infection, which is a leading cause of nosocomial diarrhea in the United States, and a major cause of death, worldwide.

There is clinical evidence that topical dermatological preparations containing tea tree oil and thyme oil may be effective in preventing transmittal of CA-MRSA.

Vaccines do not suffer the problem of resistance because a vaccine enhances the body's natural defenses, while an antibiotic operates separately from the body's normal defenses. Nevertheless, new strains may evolve that escape immunity induced by vaccines; for example an update Influenza vaccine is needed each year.

While theoretically promising, anti-staphylococcal vaccines have shown limited efficacy, because of immunological variation between Staphylococcus species, and the limited duration of effectiveness of the antibodies produced. Development and testing of more effective vaccines is under way.[citation needed]

The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), realizing the need for the reduction of antibiotic use, has been working on two alternatives. One alternative is to prevent diseases by adding cytokines instead of antibiotics to animal feed.[citation needed] These proteins are made in the animal body "naturally" after a disease and are not antibiotics so they do not contribute to the antibiotic resistance problem. Furthermore, studies on using cytokines have shown that they also enhance the growth of animals like the antibiotics now used, but without the drawbacks of non-therapeutic antibiotic use. Cytokines have the potential to achieve the animal growth rates traditionally sought by the use of antibiotics without the contribution of antibiotic resistance associated with the widespread non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics currently utilized in the food animal production industries. Additionally, CSIRO is working on vaccines for diseases.[citation needed]