India enters age of 3D printed body parts

February 26, 2017

Gurgaon, Feb 26: 3D printed body parts have become a reality in India, a game changer which promises to alter the medical landscape in India.

The courage of a school teacher has ushered in almost unnoticed a quiet medical revolution in India with links that spread from Bareilly to Gurgaon.

A doctor from Metro Hospital, Noida said, "3D printing is indeed an upcoming innovation offering personalised medicine."

Efforts are also being made to master the same technique on living tissue to replace full organs but that is still some distance away. Imagine printing a copy of your own kidney to replace a damaged one!

Earlier this month, a team of young doctors from Medanta: The Medicity in Gurgaon on the outskirts of the capital successfully performed a surgery on the failing spine of a woman and inserted for the first time a 3D printed titanium implant giving the woman a completely new lease of life.

Almost miraculously four days after the surgery, the woman was walking. Had traditional surgical techniques been adopted, according to the doctors she would have walked after months.

Dr Naresh Trehan, founder of Medanta, said, "3D printing technology has opened up whole new vista to re-create body parts to save lives."

After a school teacher suffered a debilitating collapse of her neck vertebra due to TB, doctors from Medanta claimed to have used Indias first 3D printed titanium implant to bring the patient back from near collapse to near normal life.

Last month, walking and talking were a Herculean task for the 32-year-old patient who is also a dancer and singer, her neck was collapsing, as the TB bug had slowly consumed the second and third vertebra in her neck.

Once the spinal cord started getting compressed, the woman started losing sensation on all her limbs, making life very difficult.

After a first-of-its-kind surgery in India, she can now hope to lead a near normal life. Having undergone a 10-hour surgery of February 3, the patient who does want to be identified, said, "Im better now, but towards the end I had a lot of problem. I was not able to walk, I could not sleep at night because of the pain nor could I do anything. Now I am feeling much better."

Faced with this complex medical problem, a team of 10 health specialists decided to deploy for the first time a custom made ultra-modern 3D printed titanium implant to replace the two infected vertebra in her neck.

The other option would have been to use a piece of bone from the patients own leg but that would have, according to the medical team, kept her in the bed for more than 6 months after the surgery.

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54 pc Indians cancelling or not booking their planned travel this summer: Survey

Agencies

March 16,2020

New Delhi, Mar 16: A recent survey across 140 districts of the country shows that about 54 per cent of Indians are finding travelling to be unsafe as the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic sweeps globally.

The big worry that people have is community transmission, something that researchers from around the world have approximated at 10 per cent of total infections and more common in places like Wuhan in China, South Korea, Iran and Italy.

The months of March to June have historically been high travel season for most Indians, largely due to the summer vacations in schools. "But it seems that Indians do not want to take a chance with this rather scary virus and are either cancelling or postponing their travel plans," concluded the survey by LocalCircles.

The survey gathered more than 22,000 responses from participants in tier one, two and three cities. It said 48 per cent Indians plan to cancel their international business travel for the next four months.

Besides, nearly 38 per cent of respondents said they had to pay cancellation fee to the website, travel agent, airline or railways.

"These are testing times for the entire travel and tourism industry -- airlines, hotels, travel agents as well as small tour and taxi operators. The best solution at this point is to adjust cost structures, stay flexible and work with a collective approach to minimise the period of impact to both citizens and business," said LocalCircles.

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Smoking linked to higher risk of coronavirus, says WHO

Agencies

July 2,2020

London, Jul 2: The World Health Organisation says smoking is linked to a higher risk of severe illness and death from the coronavirus in hospitalised patients, although it was unable to specify exactly how much greater those risks might be.

In a scientific brief published this week, the U.N. health agency reviewed 34 published studies on the association between smoking and Covid-19, including the probability of infection, hospitalisation, severity of disease and death.

WHO noted that smokers represent up to 18% of hospitalised coronavirus patients and that there appeared to be a significant link between whether or not patients smoked and the severity of disease they suffered, the type of hospital interventions required and patients' risk of dying.

In April, French researchers released a small study suggesting smokers were at less risk of catching Covid-19 and planned to test nicotine patches on patients and health workers — but their findings were questioned by many scientists at the time who cited the lack of definitive data.

WHO says "the available evidence suggests that smoking is associated with increased severity of disease and death in hospitalized Covid-19 patients. It recommends that smokers quit.

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