SPIRIT OF MUMBAI

May  22  2020:  Meenakshi Hospital, the largest multispecialty hospital in Thanjavur and a part of Meenakshi Mission Hospital and Research Centre, Madurai, has designed a cost-effective purifying respirator system that provides 100% protection from Covid-19 infection for surgeons and other healthcare professionals in operation theatres.  This ingenious design, the first in the world, is named Tanjore Air Purifying Respirator (TAPR). Essentially, the system securely delivers compressed medical grade compressed air, already available in operation theatres for administering anesthesia and operating pneumatic drills, to healthcare professionals through a hood. A TAPR unit can be set up at as low as Rs 3,000 per person. In comparison, the conventional air purifying system, known as Power Air Purifying Respirator (PAPR), costs Rs 1.2 lakhs per person. Commenting about TAPR,  Dr Guru Shankar , Chairman, Meenakshi Hospital, said, “Experts are of the op...

16 th  May 2020, Mumbai:   Prabha Khaitan Foundation , an organization that is dedicated to the socio-cultural welfare and humanitarian cause had through its platform   Kitaab , organized a virtual book launch of the e-book ‘ The Coronavirus: What you Need to Know about the Global Pandemic’.  The book is   written by   Dr Swapneil Parikh , co-founder DIY Health,   Maherra Desai , clinical psychologist and medical researcher and   Dr Rajesh Parikh , Director of Medical Research and Neuropsychiatry, Jaslok Hospital. Published by   Penguin , the book takes the reader through the history of pandemics while giving some serious advice on how to keep oneself safe from the deadly virus.   Kitaab,  connects Asian writers with readers globally and provides a writing and publishing platform to emerging and seasoned writers from the region to express themselves creatively. Ms. Shama Deo, President of Spectrum - a Study group from Pune co...

The world was caught off guards when Covid19 announced its arrival as a form of a pandemic across the globe within a month, inflicting mass casualties in developed countries as Europe and US after China unlike its 6 other disease in last 2 decades; from SARS (2002), Bird flu (2005), Swine flu (2009), MERS (2012), Ebola (2014), Nipah (2018) to the present SARSnCOVID (2019). While several novel lines of therapies are being tried out with encouraging results, the economic slowdown, logistics problems and casualties we have incurred by this highly infectious virus has been scary. Had it started in the developing world, probably it would not have received so much attention with the usual blame game by the west, eager for a respite with urgency. None is willing to invest in research on tuberculosis, leprosy, malaria, diarrhea or rabies, thinking beyond their narrow borders and the myopic vision. The medical professional’s world over is eager to find a definitive remedy and preventi...