Indian students in Germany need not pay to study: Envoy

October 22, 2012

india_students_in_germany


New Delhi, October 22: Germany, a hub of quality scientific research and innovation, is keen to attract the brightest Indian minds for further studies and research and has as an incentive made it easier for students to stay over and work, the country's envoy has said. Another incentive for students is that German universities don't charge any fees.

"In Germany you don't pay to study in the universities," Michael Steiner, Germany's envoy to India, told IANS in an interview.

The students only have to pay for their board and lodging, he added.
There are at present 6,000 Indian students in Germany, and the country is eager to attract more, he said.


"Earlier, students who wanted to stay over could not, and this was a problem. This year, we have facilitated that students keen to stay over and work can do so," Mr Steiner said. This would be done on the basis of specific work permits.

And, to give a fillip to Indo-German scientific and technological cooperation, Germany is setting up an institute in Delhi to facilitate the exchange of science and innovation, Mr Steiner said, describing it as "one of the defining pillars of our bilateral relations".

The German House for Research and Innovation (DWIH), New Delhi, coming up on Oct 27 near the German embassy here, will help Indian students wanting to go to Germany and vice versa, as well as facilitate bilateral research projects, he said.


The DWIH "will be part of the Ivy League from our perspective", he said.

The ambassador does not foresee language to be a barrier for Indian students as German universities now offer courses in English, he said.

"But it is an enrichment to learn the German language... And it has been observed that Indians are good at learning German," Mr Steiner said.

The DWIH will act like a hub for young talents and a house for scientific innovation, which is one of Germany's strengths, said the ambassador.

Among the 14 universities and member institutions of the DWIH are the well-known Heidelberg University, the Max Planck Society and the University of Cologne.

"The DWIH is mainly an address for facilitating study in Germany," he said, adding that there was an increase of 20 percent in the number of Indian students going to Germany in 2011 from the previous year.

"This is encouraging, but we expect a further increase," he said.

The DWIH is one of the five set up by Germany across the world, with the others in Sao Paolo (Brazil), Moscow (Russia), New York (USA) and Tokyo (Japan)

To a question on how much a student would have to spend to stay in Germany, Mr Steiner said it depends on the city.

"We have very good universities in small cities. It all depends on where the student wants to go," he said, adding that staying in Berlin would be relatively cheaper than Munich.

According to a study by the Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, more than 53,000 Indians went abroad in 2000 for a degree and at the end of the decade, the count shot up to 190,000.

The US is the top country having most number of Indian students, with the UK a close second. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of Indian students in Europe increased from 3,348 to 51,556, with the UK seeing a rise from 3,962 to 36,105.

Mr Steiner was full of praise for India's excellence in the field of IT and German companies' collaboration with Indian firms.

"I have spoken to Infosys Germany and found them pretty impressive," he said.

Infosys is in collaboration with German IT major SAP, while Wipro has tied up with Siemens.



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News Network
February 18,2020

Beijing, Feb 18: A hospital director at the epicentre of China's virus epidemic died on Tuesday, state media said, the latest medical worker to fall victim to the new coronavirus spreading across the country.

The COVID-19 virus, which is believed to have originated in Wuhan late last year, has infected more than 72,000 people and killed nearly 1,900.

Liu Zhiming, the director of Wuchang Hospital in Wuhan, died Tuesday morning after "all-out rescue efforts failed," state broadcaster CCTV reported.

China said last week that six medical workers had died from the virus, while 1,716 have been infected.

Liu's death was initially reported by Chinese media and bloggers shortly after midnight on Tuesday -- but the stories were later deleted and replaced with reports that doctors were still trying to save him.

After initial reports of his death were denied, the hospital told AFP on Tuesday morning that doctors were giving him life-saving treatment.

Liu's death has echoes of that of Wuhan ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who had been punished by authorities for sounding the alarm about the virus in late December.

Li's death prompted a national outpouring of grief as well as anger against the authorities, who were accused of mishandling the crisis.

People took to social media to mourn Liu on Tuesday, with many users on the Twitter-like Weibo platform drawing critical comparisons between Liu's death and Li's.

In both cases their deaths were initially reported in state media posts -- later deleted -- and their deaths denied, before being finally confirmed again.

"Has everyone forgotten what happened to Li Wenliang? They forcefully attempted resuscitation after he died," one Weibo commenter wrote.

Another commenter said, Liu "already died last night, (but) some people are addicted to torturing corpses".

A hashtag about Liu's death had 29 million views by Tuesday afternoon.

Doctors in Wuhan face shortages of masks and protective bodysuits, with some even wearing makeshift hazmat suits and continuing to work despite showing respiratory symptoms, health workers have told AFP.

Hubei province and its capital Wuhan have been the hardest hit by the virus, accounting for nearly 1,800 of the deaths from the virus so far.

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News Network
June 9,2020

Jun 9: The World Health Organization says it still believes the spread of the coronavirus from people without symptoms is “rare,” despite warnings from numerous experts worldwide that such transmission is more frequent and likely explains why the pandemic has been so hard to contain.

Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO''s technical lead on COVID-19 said at a press briefing on Monday that many countries are reporting cases of spread from people who are asymptomatic, or those with no clinical symptoms.

But when questioned in more detail about these cases, Van Kerkhove said many of them turn out to have mild disease, or unusual symptoms.

Although health officials in countries including Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere have warned that COVID-19 is spreading from people without symptoms, WHO has maintained that this type of spread is not a driver of the pandemic and is probably accounts for about 6 per cent of spread, at most.

Numerous studies have suggested that the virus is spreading from people without symptoms, but many of those are either anecdotal reports or based on modeling.

Van Kerkhove said that based on data from countries, when people with no symptoms of COVID-19 are tracked over a long period to see if they spread the disease, there are very few cases of spread.

“We are constantly looking at this data and we''re trying to get more information from countries to truly answer this question,” she said. “It still appears to be rare that asymptomatic individuals actually transmit onward.”

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Agencies
March 28,2020

Canadian researchers are developing a DNA vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 and has currently infected nearly 5,00,000 people worldwide and crippled the global economy.

Entos Pharmaceuticals, a health-care biotechnology company headed by a University of Alberta researchers, develop new therapeutic compounds using the company's proprietary drug-delivery platform and has begun manufacturing vaccine candidates against the novel coronavirus.

"Given the urgency of the situation, we can have a lead candidate vaccine within two months. Once we have that it's a race to get it into clinical trials," said John Lewis, CEO of Entos and a Professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.

Lewis said in comparison to a traditional vaccine, DNA-based vaccines hold several advantages.

Nucleic acids are introduced directly into the patient's own cells, causing them to make pieces of the virus--tricking the immune system into mounting a response without the full virus actually being present, the researcher said.

According to the company, the approach is recognised as being easier to move into large-scale manufacturing, offers improved vaccine stability and works without needing an infectious agent.

In the current absence of a vaccine for COVID-19, several companies around the world are mounting efforts to begin similar work.

The first clinical trial using a DNA-based vaccine developed by Moderna Inc.in the US on March 13.

Their approach allows for antibodies to be made in the human trial volunteers against a specific protein on the surface of the coronavirus that lets the virus enter human cells.

The hope is that the antibodies will stop the interaction.

Though this approach is designed to be effective against COVID-19 specifically, Lewis said Entos is taking a different tack.

The company plans to use plasmid DNA to amplify the production of key coronavirus surface and structural proteins with each injection, with an eye to the bigger picture.

"Many of the structural proteins in the virus are pretty well conserved across all the coronaviruses, including SARS and MERS," said Lewis.

"We're hoping that if we express more of the structural proteins that are common to most coronaviruses, we can inhibit the current COVID-19, and also potentially protect against all coronaviruses both past and future," Lewis added.

To move the project forward quickly, the company is seeking financial support from both provincial and federal levels of government.

"We have the opportunity to save a lot of lives, and I think it's really upon us and governments to find solutions for that," Lewis said.

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