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Facebook Offer For Tasmanian Retreat Alarms Facebookers
Via TheNextWeb: Some of you may know that Facebook started a Groupon-like coupon feature called Facebook Offers. It turns out, though, that Facebook hasn't been publicizing it much, which means many people haven't a clue it exists. When a Tasmanian company pilot-testing Facebook's Offers service signed up to trial the service, they saw replies and shares of their $99/night offer spike. Facebook page visitors who "Liked" the resort were automatically received a no-pay coupon that they could redeem if they chose. Well and good, except that many Facebookers panicked: they flagged the note as spam and wondered if their accounts had been hacked. With 3 million people connecting with their Facebook page after the offer went into effect (they had 50 vouchers), and asking to be removed from their "list," Huon Bush Retreats posted an explanatory note on their Facebook page. "We apologise to anyone who finds our offer to be offensive. However there is nothing that we can do to change this. Only Facebook has control of how Offers are distributed."

Lenovo Invests $800 Million to improve its Mobile Gaming Products

Black Death

The gene may even spread to the microbial cause of bubonic plague, the medieval scourge known as Black Death that still persists in pockets of the globe.

“It’s a matter of time and chance,” says Mark Toleman, a molecular geneticist at Cardiff University. Plasmids carrying the NDM-1 gene can easily be inserted into the genetic material of Yersinia pestis, the cause of plague, making the infection harder to treat, Toleman says.

“There is a tsunami that’s going to happen in the next year or two when antibiotic resistance explodes,” says Ghafur, 40, seated at a polished wooden table in a consulting room in Chennai as patients fill 20 metal chairs in the waiting area, forcing others into the corridor. “We need wartime measures to deal with this now.”

R.K. Srivastava, India’s former director general of health services, says the government is giving top priority to antimicrobial resistance, including increasing surveillance of hospitals’ antibiotics use.
Name Shame

At the same time, it’s trying to preserve the country’s health-tourism industry. Bristling that foreigners coined a name that singles out their capital to describe an emerging health nightmare, officials say the world is picking on India for troubles that impede all developing nations.

When Indian researchers joined international teams studying the NDM-1 gene, the government questioned the data and methods of the scientists, among them Chennai microbiologist Karthikeyan K. Kumarasamy.

“These bacteria were present globally,” says Nirmal K. Ganguly, a former director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research and one of 13 members of a government task force created in September 2010 to respond to the NDM-1 threat.

“When you are blamed, the only reaction is that you put your back to the wall and fight.”

Ulterior Motive?

S.S. Ahluwalia, a former deputy opposition leader in the upper house of India’s parliament and a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, says Western rivals want to muscle in on the medical tourism industry. Josef Woodman, founder of the guidebook “Patients Beyond Borders,” values the industry globally at $54 billion a year.

“These reports are meant to destabilize India’s emergence as a health destination,” says Ahluwalia, whose term ended in April.

About 850,000 medical tourists traveled to India in 2010 for treatments from lifesaving cancer operations to cosmetic surgeries, generating $872 million in revenue, according to the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India, or Assocham. The number of foreign patients is predicted to almost quadruple by 2015, the trade body says.

Manish Kakkar, a doctor researching infectious diseases at the New Delhi-based Public Health Foundation of India and a task force member, says the government has its priorities wrong.

“We have been in a phase of denial,” he says. “Rather than responding to the situation scientifically, we’ve completely diverted attention, saying that it’s attacking our medical tourism.”
‘That’s What’s Scary’

Kakkar and others worry about NDM-1 because unlike germs such as VRE, short for the vancomycin-resistant enterococci bug that can cause infection around a patient’s surgical incision, NDM-1 is spreading beyond hospitals.

Two travelers from the Netherlands picked up an NDM-1 bug in their bowels after visiting India in 2009 although they hadn’t received medical care there, says Maurine Leverstein-van Hall, a clinical microbiologist at the University Medical Center in the Dutch city of Utrecht.

“That’s what’s scary,” she says. “It’s not just surgery or being near a hospital. In some way, you get it through the food chain or through the water.”

For now, it’s impossible to tell how common NDM-1 infections are or how often the mutant germs kill because testing and surveillance are inadequate in developing countries, says Keith Klugman, the William H. Foege chair of global health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta.
‘Perfect Breeding Ground’

Cardiff’s Walsh estimates 100 million Indians carry germs that harbor the NDM-1 gene, based on an extrapolation of studies in New Delhi and from neighboring Pakistan.

“It’s not measured, and that’s the problem,” says Klugman, who pinpoints India as the epicenter.

India’s jammed cities, poor sanitation and abundant antibiotics produce an ideal incubator, Harvard’s Moellering says.

“You have almost no control over the prescription of antibiotics,” says Moellering, who has studied drug resistance for four decades. “You have horrible sanitation problems in many parts of the country. You have incredible poverty, and you have crowding. When you put those four things together, it’s the perfect breeding ground for multidrug-resistant bacteria.”

Antibiotics even pollute India’s rivers, streams and soil. The bacteria that thrive in these places do so because they’ve developed resistance to the drugs they encounter. People or animals who ingest the water or soil may become colonized by the resistant germs.
Mining Cipro

Until the government built a pipeline to a modern sewage plant in 2010, the Patancheru Enviro Tech Ltd. treatment facility on some days released the equivalent of 45,000 daily doses of ciprofloxacin into the Isakavagu stream outside Hyderabad in southern India, Swedish researchers reported in 2007. The plant treated wastewater from drug-making factories.

Residue from ciprofloxacin, a mainstay treatment for E. coli infections, was so prevalent in river sediment downstream that lead researcher Joakim Larsson of the University of Gothenburg jokes, “Had ciprofloxacin been a little bit more expensive, we could probably mine it from the ground.”

India’s antibiotics overload is forcing doctors to rely on ever-more-powerful drugs. Many now turn to a class called penicillin-based carbapenems to treat ailments as routine as urinary tract infections, says Grayson, who was editor-in-chief of medical text “Kucer’s The Use of Antibiotics” (Hodder Arnold/ASM Press, 2010).
‘Antibiotic Stewardship’

NDM-1 has rendered even carbapenems useless, sometimes leaving no way to fight infections. Two drugs potentially capable of treating NDM-1 bacteria have toxic side effects in some patients that include an increased risk of death.

“It’s an example of why we need to have good surveillance and why we need to have good antibiotic stewardship,” says Thomas R. Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. “We are looking at the specter of untreatable illness.”

Drugmakers have been slow to respond with new medicines. Most abandoned antibiotic discovery during the past decade, says Karen Bush, a microbiologist at Indiana University in Bloomington. She led teams that developed five bacteria-fighting drugs beginning in the 1970s in laboratories that are now part of AstraZeneca Plc (AZN), Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY), Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer Inc. (PFE)

Companies instead pursued hypertension and high-cholesterol drugs that patients take for a lifetime rather than a few weeks, she says.
International Uproar

Kumarasamy, the Chennai microbiologist, says he thought he was doing his country a favor when he helped track down the cause of unexplained deaths inside India. Instead, he sparked an international uproar over NDM-1.

Beginning in June 2000, Kumarasamy, now 36, studied bacteria and went from hospital to hospital in Chennai to collect specimens. He says he witnessed a steady increase in difficult-to-treat infections. Patients were dying, and doctors couldn’t identify what type of resistant germs killed them, he says.

“No matter how skilled or intelligent the doctor is, they are helpless when it comes to these infections,” he says over lunch of rice and curry in a noisy Chennai food court. He didn’t keep a tally of the deaths.

Kumarasamy, who received a Bachelor of Science degree from Navarasam Arts & Science College in Tamil Nadu state in 1997, says he began isolating bacteria from the blood, sputum, pus and urine of patients and freezing the samples. He quit his lab job in 2007 to study resistant germs for a doctorate in microbiology at the University of Madras. He’s winding up his thesis on carbapenem-resistant bacteria.
Festering Bedsores

Kumarasamy’s curiosity spiked in 2008 when he realized he was dealing with something totally new. He reached out to Walsh, whose Cardiff lab was at the forefront of international antibiotic resistance research.

Around that time, Walsh was studying the case of a diabetic stroke patient of Indian origin. The man had festering bedsores and had been transferred from New Delhi to his home in Sweden for treatment. When bacteria cultured from his urine and feces evaded more than a dozen drugs, including last-resort carbapenems, Christian G. Giske, a clinical microbiologist at Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital, sent the samples to Walsh’s lab.
Stockholm Hotel

In a hotel room in the Swedish capital, Walsh and Giske named the gene that made the bacteria immune to virtually all these antibiotics New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1.

Beta-lactams are a class of antibiotics that includes penicillins, cephalosporins and carbapenems. Beta-lactamase is an enzyme that destroys those drugs. Metallo-beta-lactamases are so named because they contain zinc and destroy carbapenems, the most powerful beta-lactams.

Kumarasamy, suspecting something similar in his own specimens, asked Walsh to share the DNA sequence of this new bacterial gene. Walsh did -- and Kumarasamy got a match.

Kumarasamy began visiting Chennai hospitals anew to look for drug-resistant specimens. He also got samples from researchers in India’s northern Haryana state.

When his collection was added to those Walsh and his colleagues were studying, the researchers discovered the same NDM-1 gene from four countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the U.K. For most of the British patients, the link was recent travel to India or neighboring Pakistan.

In Kumarasamy’s samples from inside India, many cases emerged in people who hadn’t recently been hospitalized. That suggested the bacteria were spreading in the community.
‘Unsung Hero’

“He is India’s unsung hero,” Walsh says.

The University of Madras initially thought so, too. It feted Kumarasamy after he became the youngest scholar from the 155-year-old institution to have research appear in any publication of the British medical journal “The Lancet.” His August 2010 paper, in “The Lancet Infectious Diseases,” became that publication’s most-read article that year.

The mood soured a few days later. Officials at India’s Ministry of Health & Family Welfarebalked at the gene’s name, which threatened medical tourism’s public image.

“There was a lot of stress and tension, and I could not sleep properly for two months,” says Kumarasamy, who says he developed gastric reflux and heartburn.

The next month, authorities at the ministry grilled the eight Indian contributors to the “Lancet” report, including lead author Kumarasamy, according to two co-authors who declined to be identified because their employers don’t permit them to speak to the media.
‘Batten Down the Hatches’

Officials questioned their data and chastised them for sending specimens overseas without approval, saying the researchers had violated a 13-year-old regulation, according to two in the group.

The Indian Council of Medical Research says it requires researchers to submit detailed proposals to send any bacterial collections abroad. The process may take at least four months.

“The regulations were already in place,” says Sandhya Visweswariah, a professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.

The researchers countered that the rules were nebulous and were rarely enforced.

“It is suppression of scientific freedom,” Walsh says of the government behavior. “They just try to batten down the hatches and make everything very, very difficult and pretend nothing has happened.”
Front-Page News

After front-page stories on the superbug appeared in Indian newspapers, the government formed an antibiotic resistance task force. It recommended in April 2011 that antibiotic use be tracked in the country’s 100,000 hospitals to find excessive prescribing. The group advised making it harder to get antibiotics without a prescription by requiring pharmacists to keep records for two years to aid audits and inspections.

Current rules make a prescription mandatory, but regulations are rarely enforced and it’s easy to get potent antibiotics, even intravenous ones, without a doctor’s assent. The group advised enacting rules allowing drug inspectors to immediately cancel the license of pharmacists dispensing unprescribed antibiotics.

Task force member Ganguly says tracking antibiotic use will be difficult.

“How do you regulate 1.2 billion people with so much diversity?” he asks.
Dying Babies

While Kumarasamy was documenting NDM-1 in Chennai hospitals, pediatrician Vipin Vashishtha was discovering how deadly the gene can be.

In June 2010, new father Sanjeev Thakran, 28, rushed his half-hour-old son in a car through monsoon-soaked streets to Vashishtha’s Mangla Children’s Hospital in Bijnor. His wife, Lalita, had delivered baby Tapas in a maternity hospital across town three weeks early, and the infant was laboring for air.

Nurses in green scrubs warmed the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) newborn in a dome-covered crib and fed him milk and medicines through a nasal tube. About 2 feet away, a frail-looking baby was connected to a ventilator, Sanjeev Thakran says.

Vashishtha, seated on a leather swivel chair in his consulting room, recalls thinking that Tapas might need only a few days of intensive care. Instead, the baby spent weeks in and out of the unit. Blood sometimes trickled from his nose and shriveling umbilicus, according to medical records.

Even though he was being treated with a carbapenem, the most powerful class of antibiotic, bacteria raged inside his tiny lungs and bloodstream, eventually attacking membranes covering his brain and spinal cord.
Incurable Scourge

Other infants in the eight-crib neonatal intensive care unit were suffering, too. Vashishtha, 48, had tried several antibiotics without success. When carbapenems didn’t work, he says, he felt helpless because he knew he was dealing with a potentially incurable scourge.

Tapas died 11 weeks after he was admitted. Lab results identified the culprit a month later: NDM-1. The gene was in bacteria known as Klebsiella pneumoniae. The germ exists in people’s gastrointestinal tract and can cause pneumonia and urinary-tract infections in hospital patients.

The lab also found two soil-borne species that normally cause trivial infections but that were suddenly becoming killers.

Tapas was one of 14 infants at the hospital who were infected with NDM-1-containing bacteria over the course of 17 months. Six of the babies died. Among the eight survivors, half developed meningitis, arthritis or water on the brain, Vashishtha wrote to an Indian medical journal in February 2011.
‘Horrific Period’

“It was the most horrific period,” Vashishtha says as he fixes his eyes on the playpen where he amuses children in his office. “I was losing neonates at regular intervals. I suspected we were dealing with something quite different, something quite new.”

Vashishtha says he has improved infection control, walling off part of the ICU for contagious, complicated cases.

He can’t, however, control what happens outside his hospital. Sewage from nearby homes flows in an open drain along one wall of the two-story building.

Bijnor, like other small cities in Uttar Pradesh, lacks a modern underground drainage system. During the rainy season, it’s impossible not to wade through sewage water, the doctor says.
‘Wash Hands Properly’

So far, Vashishtha has prevented more NDM-1 deaths. He fumigates his wards every four weeks and applies fresh paint every three months. He keeps hand-sanitizing liquid in his office, along the corridors and next to every bed in intensive care. Nurses must wash their hands with running water and soap and scrub with an antimicrobial sanitizer before handling patients.

“The first and foremost step to avoiding hospital-acquired infection is to wash hands properly,” he says.

India’s major hospitals are marshaling tactics from common cleanliness to computerized databases to outsmart resistant bacteria and prevent more tragedies.

Artemis Health Institute, a private, 300-bed specialty hospital in Gurgaon, southwest of New Delhi, employs an infection-control officer who collects data every month on the hospital’s four most troublesome bacteria to review patterns of drug resistance. The officer, Namita Jaggi, also serves as national secretary of a Buenos Aires-based group that collates infection information worldwide.
‘Infection Surveillance 24/7’

About 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) away, cardiac surgeon Naresh Trehan’s medical complex,Medanta-The Medicity, requires patients transferring from other hospitals to be screened for resistant bacteria. This procedure, routine in some Nordic countries, isn’t standard in India.

Medanta has a strict hand-washing policy and a 40-member team to monitor infections, says Trehan, 65, who trained in cardiac surgery at New York University and worked at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan before returning to India in 1988.

“We have a very senior person whose sole responsibility is to keep the whole hospital under infection surveillance 24/7,” he says.

Livermore at the U.K.’s Health Protection Agency says these efforts may not be enough in a country where 626 million people defecate in the open and that treats only 30 percent of the 10.1 billion gallons of sewage generated each day. Even the most modern hospitals can’t exist as islands of cleanliness, he says.

“How does the hospital -- however good its surgeons and physicians -- isolate itself when its patients, staff and food all come from outside, where they are exposed to this soup of resistance?” he asks.
‘Hope for the Future’

Bush, the antibiotics researcher, has been investigating novel ways to fight bacteria since 1977. She says combinations of existing drugs, including an experimental compound from AstraZeneca in late-stage patient studies, may neutralize some carbapenem-destroying enzymes.

Should these mixtures pan out, they may help the superdrugs regain at least some of their potency, potentially extending their usefulness for a decade or more, she says.

A drug candidate from Basel, Switzerland-based Basilea Pharmaceutica AG (BSLN) in early-stage trials shows some promise against NDM-1, she says.

“What’s frustrating is to see that companies refused to address the issue until the last few years,” Bush says. “There are still some that are trying, and that’s the hope for the future.”
‘Very Cautious’

Drugs that could once again tackle the world’s most resistant germs would be a relief for people worldwide, Norway’s Skaret among them. She spent more than six months fearing a microbial time bomb until she learned that the NDM-1 supergerms had passed from her system.

Even though she escaped physical harm, Skaret says, NDM-1 made her feel isolated. She says therapists, concerned about their own exposure, refused to help her with rehabilitation to recover from the car accident. Neighbors who delivered food were careful not to get too close.

“When they heard about it, they were very cautious,” she says.

If Walsh’s projection is accurate, 100 million Indians may be carrying the NDM-1 gene unwittingly and doing little to contain its spread. The number of countries reporting NDM-1 will continue to grow as more bacteria pick up the gene and people transport it around the globe.

To prevent a worldwide catastrophe, microbiologists Kumarasamy and Walsh -- along with scores of scientists and doctors inside and outside India -- are sounding an alarm.

“Combine sophisticated medicine, poor sanitation and heavy antibiotic usage, and you have a rocket fuel to drive the accumulation of resistance,” Livermore says. “That surely is what India has created.”

Update 1 : Those who have followed our advice below and short accordingly, they have made decent gains. Congratulations to all. One can hold the short positions as Nifty will see more downside in a week ahead.

Tips & Outlook:


Global Markets have shown a smart bounce back from a technical levels. It was expected as European Markets were touched four and half month low intraday and then regain the positive territory. The technical suggest that markets will continue to take support from yesterday's intraday low and bounce back until buying will continue ( Let's say four to five times ) then it gradually moving lower and break the lows.

• Pfizer Inc. (PFE) Restructures, VP of Communications Out More...

Facebook is aggressively moving towards its multibillion dollar IPO. As Company has acquired few firms to boost up its strong footing in technology world before IPO. In a latest news from Facebook Inc, the company acquired Glancee,  a mobile start-up that focuses on discovery of similar folks nearby.


“We can’t wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto and Gabriel to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends,” Facebook toldAllThingsD in a statement.

Glancee

To date, Facebook has admitted to maintaining one product independently of Facebook, the billion-dollar Instagram. Despite this acquisition, following the Instagram purchase Facebook will most likely use the technology to ramp up its existing mobile application.

As of late, Glancee competitors began to pop up, including the much-hyped Highlight application, the profile of which rose tremendously during South By Southwest 2012. One of the main issues with Highlight — and similar applications like Glancee — is the serious drain on battery life that the ambient discovery app causes while running in the background of the mobile phone.

The fundamental premise of services like Glancee or Highlight is that you’re surrounded by folks you would probably get along with; based on shared interests or connections, these apps hook you up with others.

But, of course, there’s the sticky issue of privacy, which Facebook knows all too well. Not everyone wants a new friend coming up and saying hello, however novel the app idea is.

Regardless, it signals that Facebook remains committed to innovating in mobile. And that’s important, considering that nearly half of the company’s monthly visitors are accessing the site on a mobile device.

The final sum and terms of the deal were not disclosed, but all three co-founding members of the Glancee team will join Facebook at its Menlo Park campus.

Following the headlines from France Election as Socialist leader Hollande to run a government and Greece election verdict might soar market sentiment.US futures are down more than 1 % with asia dipping more than 2 %. It has been read that Nifty will open a gap down, as more downside predicted in our outlook letter yesterday. It may be possible that Nifty may break 5000 today and even go below 5000 intraday. We will advise to go short and book profit around 5000. The Markets are in downtrend so don't get away with rally on a long side but try to short on every rally. Good luck for handsome returns. If you have question, comment it below. Our team will be happy to answer.

"Marvel's The Avengers" hits US and Canadian theaters with record sales of more than $ 200 millions this weekend for the Box Office.

Revenue topped the previous best of $169.2 million set by “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” last year, researcher Hollywood.com Box-Office said today in an e-mailed statement. Analysts had forecast sales of $150 million to $170 million for “The Avengers.”

Jeremy Renner, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson perform in "The Avengers," from Walt Disney Studios. Photographer: Zade Rosenthal/Marvel via Bloomberg

The Avengers

Summer ticket sales are expected to surpass the record of $4.4 billion set last year, according to Jeff Bock, box-office analyst at Exhibitor Relations Co. Other films scheduled in the coming weeks include Warner Bros.’ “The Dark Knight Rises,” directed by Christopher Nolan, and Sony Corp. (6758)’s “Men in Black 3,” a sequel that reunites Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as government agents managing Earth’s secret alien population.

“The Avengers” is the first Marvel movie Disney is distributing since buying the comic-book company for $4.2 billion in 2009. The movie provides Burbank, California-based Disney with a hit after the box-office failure of “John Carter,” the science-fiction film released in March that resulted in a $200 million loss for the company.

Rich Ross, the head of Disney’s film unit, resigned in April, and the company hasn’t yet hired a replacement. Disney is scheduled to report fiscal second-quarter results on May 8.

In a final verdict to the french elections, Francois Hollande defeated French President Nicolas Sarkozy as country favored socialist ruled government for the first time in 17 years.

Francois Hollande

The 57-year-old Hollande got about 52 percent against about 48 percent for Sarkozy, according to estimates by pollsters CSA and Harris Interactive. The campaign isn’t over; France elects its lower house of parliament in five weeks.

French Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Francois Hollande, right, greets people as he leaves the polling station during the second round of presidential election in Tulle, southwestern France.

The challenger inherits an economy that is barely growing, with jobless claims at their highest in 12 years and a rising debt load that makes France vulnerable to the financial crisis that has rocked the euro region the past two years. Sarkozy became the ninth euro leader to fall in that time and the first French president in 30 years to fail to win re-election.

“Hollande’s bet was that rejection of Nicolas Sarkozy was enough to get him elected,” Dominique Reynie, senior researcher at Paris’s Institute of Political Studies, said before the vote. “The message was that if you don’t like Sarkozy then I’m your best bet.”

Sarkozy’s departure may sharpen tensions with key allies as Hollande has advocated a more aggressive European Central Bank role in spurring growth -- a measure opposed by Germany -- and an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan.

While Socialists stand ready to dominate policy making for the first time since 1993 -- holding both the presidency and the Cabinet -- bond yields suggest Hollande may maintain market confidence. Ten-year French debt yields 124 basis points more than comparable German securities. That’s down from 145 basis points after he won the first round April 22 and lower than the 133 basis points at the start of the year.

Keyboards for the iPad are not a new invention, but Logitech is throwing its own offering into the ring: The new Logitech Solar Keyboard Folio constructed especially for the iPad.



The keyboard can charge in any light: Tech2.in

Tech2in reports that the new keyboard is similar to Logitech’s solar keyboards for Mac and PC, and includes onboard solar cells that charge the built-in Bluetooth keyboard in any light, whether indoors or outdoors. When fully charged, the battery lasts for up to two years, even in complete darkness (based on an average use of two hours per day).

The folio also has two stand positions, so that users have a choice of viewing angles.Tech2in reports, “Open the folio and place your iPad in the first position to use the full keyboard when you’re typing. Place your iPad in the second position and the first keyboard row acts as your one-touch media playback and volume controls, so you can play, pause and change volume instantly. The folio also has an instant On/Off function, which means your iPad automatically wakes when you open the folio and goes on standby when you close it.”

The Logitech Solar Keyboard Folio is expected to be available later this month, for a suggested retail price of $129.99 (approx 6,887).