Overprotection may lead to increased food allergies.......

Over protective parents, who are scared of childhood food allergies, and hence delay the introduction of troublesome foods, could be unwittingly raising their child's risk.

A Melbourne-based study has found infants who were not introduced to eggs until after their first birthday were up to five times more likely to go on to develop an egg allergy.

This was compared to those who ate their first eggs from age four to six months and, University of Melbourne PhD scholar Jennifer Koplin said, it added more weight to the recent shift in official advice.

"Until recently, Australian and international guidelines recommended that infants with a family history of allergy delay introducing allergenic foods such as egg, peanut and nuts until up to two to three years of age," news.com.au quoted Koplin as saying.

"Our study suggests that babies who ingest these foods at an earlier age may be less likely to develop food allergies as they grow older.

"It seems that early introduction of egg may protect against egg allergy, while delaying its introduction may put the child at increased risk of developing an allergy," she added.

The study was conducted on 2500 infants and the timing of their introduction to eggs was checked against those who later developed the allergy.

An early introduction to cooked egg - boiled or scrambled eggs for example - was found to confer more of a protective effect than first consuming eggs in baked form - in cakes or biscuits.

Of babies aged four to six months who were introduced to cooked egg, just 5.6 per cent developed an egg allergy compared with 27.6 per cent of those introduced to cooked egg after 12 months.

A family history of egg allergy did not appear be a factor in those children who went on to develop it, while duration of breastfeeding and introduction to first solids were also ruled out.

Associate Professor Katie Allen, from the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, said more work was needed to check whether the same was true for other common allergenic foods such as nuts.

"Confirmation that early introduction is protective for other allergenic foods may help better inform parents in the future, and could have the potential to reverse the epidemic of childhood food allergy," said Allen.

The study has been published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. (ANI)

Find out Flu using Twitter.......

A computer science expert at Southeastern Louisiana University has revealed that keeping track of disease trends such as influenza outbreaks has the potential to be far quicker and less costly by monitoring a social network program such as Twitter than following the traditional methods of disease surveillance.

A process called syndromic surveillance uses collected health-related data to alert health officials to the probability of an outbreak of disease, typically influenza or other contagious diseases. The technique involves collecting data from hospitals, clinics and other sources, a labor-intensive and time consuming approach. By monitoring a social network such as Twitter, researchers can capture comments from people with the flu who are sending out status messages.

"A micro-blogging service such as Twitter is a promising new data source for Internet-based surveillance because of the volume of messages, their frequency and public availability," said Aron Culotta, assistant professor of computer science. "This approach is much cheaper and faster than having thousands of hospitals and health care providers fill out forms each week.

"The Centers for Disease Control produces weekly estimates," he added, "but those reports typically lag a week or two behind. This approach produces estimates daily."

Culotta and two student assistants analyzed more than 500 million Twitter messages over the eight-month period of August 2009 to May 2010, collected using Twitter's application programming interface (API). By using a small number of keywords to track rates of influenza-related messages on Twitter, the team was able to forecast future influenza rates.

"Once the program is running, it's actually neither time consuming nor expensive," he said. "It's entirely automated because we're running software that samples each day's messages, analyzes them and produces an estimate of the current proportion of people with the flu."

Southeastern's group obtained a 95 percent correlation with the national health statistics collected by the CDC. In addition, the results were comparable to figures collected by Google with its Flu Trends service, which tracks influenza rates by analyzing trends in query terms.

Culotta said using Twitter has an advantage over Google because the high message and posting frequency of Twitter enables up-to-the minute analysis of an outbreak. Twitter, he said, reports having more than 105 million users posting nearly 65 million messages a day. Approximately 300,000 new users are added daily.

"Despite the fact that Twitter appears targeted to a young demographic, it does in fact have quite a diverse set of users," he said. "The majority of Twitter's nearly 10 million unique visitors in February 2009 were over 35 years old, and a nearly equal percentage of users are between the ages 55 and 64 as between 18 and 24."

Culotta's research was presented at the 2010 Workshop on Social Media Analytics at the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Washington, D.C. The work was funded in part by the Louisiana Board of Regents. (ANI)

Fifth generations fighters in India........

India will have a fleet of 200 to 250 fifth generation fighter aircraft, which it is planning to jointly develop with Russia over the next 10 years.

India has finalized a preliminary design contract (PDC) with Russia after years of deliberations and will jointly develop a fifth-generation stealth fighter with Russia. Each fifth generation fighter is likely to cost India about 100 million dollars.

Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Pradeep Vasant Naik, said: "We are looking for about 200 to 250 fifth generation fighters. Some of the features we like the aircraft to possess are swing role, could fly for longer durations without refueling, super cruise, better reliability and maintainability, higher level mission computers, etc."

Speaking to reporters ahead of the Indian Air Force's 78th Anniversary this year, he said on Monday that the fifth generation fighters will start rolling out by 2017.

The contract is likely to be signed during Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's visit to New Delhi in December, if the preliminary design contract is approved by India.

The Hindustan Aeronautics Limited would be the Indian designer and builder of the stealth fighter and could cost India six billion dollar.

India's share will be about 30 percent of the total design in the stealth fighter project, and mainly focus on the composite components with the stealth function and some electronics equipments, such as avionics, electronic warfare systems and cockpit displays.

India will also be responsible to design from the single-seat stealth fighter into a two-seater type, which would be deployed by the Indian Air Force.

Russia's Sukhoi Design Bureau has been developing the stealth fifth-generation fighter PAK-FA with a range of more than 5,000 km since 1990's. By Praful Kumar Singh (ANI)

Tigers are now thriving in Sathyamangalam forest.....

Officials in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu have claimed that the number of tigers have risen in forests once used as a jungle hideout by the dreaded bandit, Veerappan.

The forest department officials said that a decade ago, tigers were rarely found in Sathyamangalam forest, but now, they have even started breeding in the area. They also said about 20 tigers have been caught on film by hidden cameras.

DNA analysis carried out on tiger droppings confirm the presence of at least 13 tigers in the forest, they claimed.

"Until 10 years ago tigers were rarely sighted here. Now we have even captured [on film]breeding tigers here," the BBC quoted the district forest officer of Sathyamangalam, as saying.

"Tigers are fiercely territorial animals. Since the number of tigers are going up in the nearby Mudumalai and Bandipur reserves, tigers might have come here and settled," he added.

The forest was used by Veerappan, a dangerous sandalwood smuggler and hunter, until he was killed in 2004.

Part of the forest was declared a wildlife sanctuary in 2008. It has now become an important migratory corridor for large mammals and is home to large numbers of elephants, black bucks, vultures and other animals and birds, the report added.

CWG - Opening Ceremony - Scarce known facts.....

About 1,200 moving lights, 25 stacks of speakers and about 2,700 shots of fireworks spread across the roof of the Jawaharlal Nehru stadium combined with a stage weighing 500 tonnes to create a spectacular opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games here today. The gigantic main stage, inspired by the ''mandala'', a sanskrit word for the geometric designs symbolic of the universe in Hinduism and Buddhism, which is one of the largest built for an opening and closing ceremony.

The stage was built within seven days by about 500 workers. Weighing an approximately 500 tonnes.

The stage is large enough to hold 500 people under it. The opening ceremony would have never been that spectacular had it not been for the lighting arrangements.

1,200 moving lights, 120 space cannons and 16 follow spots weighing approximately 75 tonnes was what it took to enchant the about 60,000 spectators. The 25 stacks of speakers produced 500,000 Watts of sound.

If one was impressed by the fireworks, it was because of the 2,700 shots spread over 88 locations on the roof of the stadium. The crowd had erupted in joy as the firecrackers went up in air heralding the beginning of the Games.

The entire system was supported by over 50 km of power cables that were used to provide constant power for the opening ceremony.