Tuesday, 27 August 2013

28 August, 2013

Babies can remember words heard before birth
Washington: Moms-to-be, note! Your unborn baby can hear you, loud and clear.
Babies develop a memory of words they hear frequently even before they are born, a new study has found.
Researchers said an unborn child does indeed hear everything, including people`s voices, which allows them to begin learning words and remembering them once they`re born.

"We believe this shows how well the brain at this age adapts to sounds. It is a sign of very early language learning, or adaptation to the sounds they heard," said study co-author Minna Huotilainen, from the University of Helsinki`s Finnish Center of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research.
"A newborn baby is not an empty canvas, but has already learned how his or her mother and other family members speak," said Huotilainen.
Researchers tested the memory of Finnish foetuses by exposing them to a single word - "tatata" - that means nothing in the Finnish language, `HealthDay News` reported.
"It is a so-called `pseudoword` that is important for research. It has three syllables, and we chose such a long word to make it challenging for the small brains to find the changes and give them something difficult to learn. Such a word could exist in Finnish. It follows all the rules of the Finnish language," Huotilainen said.
From the 29th week of pregnancy until birth, about half of the 33 pregnant women in the study listened to recordings of the word repeated hundreds of times.
Sometimes the recordings presented the word with a different middle syllable ("to") or pronounced differently.
Researchers used scans to test the activity in the brains of all the babies when they heard the word after their birth. Those who had heard it before "showed an enhanced reaction to this specific word," Huotilainen said. "They were able to process the word better, and also they were able to detect changes in the word better," Huotilainen said.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 
28.08.2013



Bharat Biotech launches fourth generation typhoid vaccine
Hyderabad: Bharat Biotech, a city-based vaccine manufacturer, today announced the launch of Typbar-TCV, the world`s first clinically proven typhoid conjugate vaccine for six months old infants and adults.
Bharat Biotech CMD Krishna M Ella said the new vaccine brings hope to millions by protecting them against typhoid caused by salmonella typhi, a highly virulent and invasive enteric bacterium.

Ella said that this is a fourth generation vaccine against typhoid disease which has been proven to provide long term protection to adults and infants. Typhoid vaccines fall short in two major counts, namely long-term protection and protection of children below two years of age.

"We hope this vaccine will reach millions of people and help reduce the burden of this devastating disease in infants and children," Ella told reporters at a press conference here, adding that his company had commenced commercial production of Typbar-TCV in pre-filled syringes at its vaccine production facility in Genome Valley.
"The pricing of the vaccine has not yet been decided. There will be two price structures. One for public institutions and the other one will be for private organisations. Pricing will be fixed by next week," he said.
The plant has the capacity to produce 10 million doses each year, which is expandable to 50 million doses per year in future. Bharat Biotech is the largest producer and supplier of typhoid vaccine in the world, having distributed over 50 million doses globally, he claimed.

Quoting World Health Organisation reports, Director-General of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) Christian Loucq said that typhoid fever kills between 250,000 to 600,000, besides causing 20 million illnesses per year, affecting mostly school children.
"The World Health Organisation reports that 90 per cent of typhoid deaths occur in Asia and persists mainly in children under five years of age. In India, typhoid fever is observed throughout the year and a greater number of cases coincide with the rainy season," Loucq said.

While typhoid fever can be cured by antibiotics, resistance to anti-microbials is widespread along with poor diagnostics, he said, adding that hence prevention of typhoid fever is better than curing it. 
28.08.2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

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