World Markets Simplified

Google's self-driven cars will soon be appearing on Nevada roads after the state's Department of Motor Vehicles approved on Monday the nation's first autonomous vehicle license.

The move came after officials rode along on drives on highways, in Carson City neighborhoods and along the famous Las Vegas Strip, the Nevada DMV said in a statement.

The Nevada legislature last year authorized self-driven cars for the state's roads, the first such law in the United States.

That law went into effect on March 1, 2012.

Google's self-driven cars rely on video cameras, radar sensors, lasers, and a database of information collected from manually driven cars to help navigate, according to the company.

The DMV licensed a Toyota Prius that Google modified with its experimental driver-less technology, developed by Stanford professor and Google Vice President Sebastian Thrun.

Google's self-driving cars have crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and driven along the picturesque Pacific Coast Highway, according to the company.

Autonomous vehicles are the "car of the future," Nevada DMV director Bruce Breslow said in a statement.

The state also has plans to eventually license autonomous vehicles owned by the members of the public, the DMV said.

Legislation to regulate autonomous cars is being considered in other states, including Google's home state of California.

"The vast majority of vehicle accidents are due to human error. Through the use of computers, sensors and other systems, an autonomous vehicle is capable of analyzing the driving environment more quickly and operating the vehicle more safely," California state Senator Alex Padilla said in March when he introduced that state's autonomous car legislation.

Other car companies are also seeking self-driven car licenses in Nevada, the DMV said.

Facebook Changes Its IPO Roadshow After Zuckerberg's Session In New York

Facebook is sensitive to the fact its first IPO roadshow event in New York didn't go as well as hoped, and has changed it significantly for today's pitch in Boston. The breakfast meeting with shareholders didn't involve the 30 minute video those attending in New York saw, leaving much more time for questions and discussions from attendees to Facebook's management--one of the criticisms leveled at Facebook after yesterday's pitch. Mark Zuckerberg was conspicuous in his absence, and Reuters reports no reason was given, but COO Sheryl Sandberg faced questions that included the company's strategy in China.

GigFunder Crowdsources Artist's Tour Funding To Fans Anywhere

A new site called GigFunder is positioning itself to be a boon to star-struck fans who want a visit from their favorite band, and cash-strapped artists who are looking for funding for their next tour. The website helps bands and fans crowdsource digital donations from across the country. It's not just bands--comedians, magicians, DJs and more can register to get funding campaigns started. Campaigns last a maximum of 30 days, and if the visit isn't fully funded the backers aren't charged. Also, it's a two-way street. An artist can make an announcement to fans, and fans can connect with artists to invite them to a gig. If a campaign is successful, fans can be rewarded with merchandize from the band or artist.

RIM to shake up executive management team with new COO, CMO.

Young women simulated oral sex with a Greek statue at a party hosted by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, a witness said on Monday at a trial where he is accused of paying for sex with an underage prostitute.

Silvio Berlusconi

Chiara Danese, a 20-year-old beauty contest winner, had tears in her eyes as she told a Milan court that Berlusconi asked the women to play sex games with a nude statue of the ancient fertility god Priapus.

"He touched the girls while they simulated oral sex with the statue," she said.

"Then Berlusconi, whom the girls called 'daddy' and he called 'my babies', also had them kiss him in his private parts. The girls meanwhile chanted 'thank God for Silvio'. I and (fellow guest) Ambra were shocked."

Berlusconi's lawyer Niccolo Ghedini offered Danese a tissue to wipe away her tears while she testified about the August 2010 party.

Berlusconi, 75, is charged with paying for sex with Moroccan-born Karima El Mahroug in 2010, when she was 17, and then abusing the powers of his office by getting her freed from police custody after she had been arrested for theft.

Prosecutors say that dozens of showgirls and aspiring starlets received cash and other gifts for taking part in sex games at his Milan home.

Berlusconi, who denies the charges, says he was only helping the young women out of generosity and accuses magistrates of mounting a politically biased campaign against him. He says his parties were "elegant, convivial dinners".

Danese and her friend Ambra Battilana are seeking damages in a separate trial where three associates of Berlusconi are accused of procuring prostitutes for him.

They said they lost job opportunities because of the bad publicity surrounding the women who attended the former prime minister's parties.

Berlusconi, a billionaire media tycoon, was forced from power in November after his repeated failure to pass tough austerity measures led to a crisis on bond markets alarmed at the weakness of the government in the euro zone's third largest economy.

The idea may sound familiar. But unlike disruptive startup Square, Verifone has $10 billion in global transactions a year at its back--and it's promising a secure, versatile payment option from day one.

Sail is an app-supported dongle that plugs into the headphone socket on iOS devices and reads cards. The dongle is free, and the app is sophisticated enough to allow store owners to actually track inventory with it (meaning they could ditch using other software). The app can also hook up several iDevices to the same account so it could act across multiple sites for a medium-sized business as well as replacing several cash registers on shop floors. It offers clever analytics, and it can also hook up to existing countertop infrastructure, so it should be able to interface with existing registers and let store owners replace their existing credit card solutions.

The reasons for merchants to do this is price, says VeriFone's Brian Hamilton, VP of its SMB Commerce unit. "There are two pricing models to go to market: One which is no monthly fee and 2.7% [commission] per swipe that obviously matches the competitive price point in the market, and then there will be a $9.95 a month one at 1.95% per swipe, across all cards. That actually is a very competitive offering for the slightly larger business. If you do more than $1,000 a month in credit cards, 2.7% isn't the most competive you can get."

The hardware and app sound a lot like part of what Square offers, like the system payment-processing rival NCR has coming up, and a lot like an iPad-centric product offered by small player Revel Systems. So what differenitates VeriFone's solution?

"We looked very closely at what was already in the market in this space, created a product that supports the small merchant in ways above and beyond what current solutions can handle, and added VeriFone’s 30+ year experience in security, encryption, support and hardware," Hamilton says. "Many merchants need more than just being able to swipe a credit card with their iPhone. That is no longer a differentiator. VeriFone adds greater context with SAIL, using social media integration, multi-device management, and tools to assist with the growth of the business over time. By supporting an open platform and architecture, we will enable services and features above and beyond what a closed-loop platform will be able to support."

According to Hamilton, VeriFone has been working on this since late 2011--so it is a reactionary product--but was determined to be thoughtful about its version, as well as listening to its business partners and spotting holes in the service that its rivals are offering. That's why, for example, VeriFone's dongle is encrypted right from the get-go--a mistake that nearly tripped Square up early in its life.

Sail also has scope to support coupons (optionally built within the app itself by the merchant, and linked to Facebook) and customery loyalty schemes, and it connects to social media so consumers can, for example, access a vendor's Twitter feed from their digital Sail receipt. It has an API and full support for third-party apps to use its payment processing systems, and VeriFone has plans to address the chip-and-PIN cards that are very common overseas (including a free PIN pad for stores). And an Android version is en route.

If that's not impressive enough the software also has a barcode scanner in it, and because Sail's software ecosystem has the ability to track stock built in, it can allow consumers to make an interaction-free "self" payment a lot like Apple's EasyPay system. Add the fact that it's fully prepared to accept NFC payments...and suddenly Sail gets a lot more interesting: As Hamilton noted "Google, Apple, credit card companies are all who's trying to win here in the NFC versus alternative payments space," he suggested, and consumers shouldn't have to worry about how their new payment tech actually works, and nor should merchants, so VeriFone's SDK is flexible so: "You should be able to take the Google Wallet, and you should be able to take the iWallet." Did he just say iWallet? Yes.

"It's not like we built this thing from scratch, we're building it onto some pretty bullet-proof architecture that already exists," was Hamilton's pithiest comment and one that aims directly at Square. While Jack Dorsey's distruptive little system is processing $4 billion in transactions per year, it seems limited to the U.S....and VeriFone is aiming at the world, and has experience of $10 billion a year in transactions.

In summary, that dramatic mobile payments revolution we've been talking about? It just got a lot closer.

It has been a year since Osama Bin Laden was shot dead in Pakistan. It will not be concluded as the end of the terror or Al Qaeda. As there was another plot of building undetectable bomb in Yemen was disrupted by US. It was planned to blow another airliner in US. But the verdict is "world is not free from Terror or Al Qaeda". There will be tug & war type situation between Good Boys and Bad Boys. In fact, it will lead to a loss of resources, money, energy, work force and other safety concerns about the common people. Read below the official statements from FBI.

The U.S. disrupted a Yemen-based plot to build a potentially undetectable bomb to blow up an airliner in the month before the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, federal and congressional officials said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has the device and is analyzing it, the agency said in a statement. The bomb is “very similar” to devices used by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in previous attempted terror strikes, the FBI said.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said her staff was briefed by intelligence officials who said the bomb was based on “the same device” used in a failed attempt by the terror group to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas 2009.

“This would have been an undetectable bomb coming in on an American airliner into the United States,” Feinstein said.

Officials with the White House, CIA, FBI and Department of Homeland Security declined to release details about the bomb’s composition, when and where the device was seized and whether the would-be bomber or others related to the plot are in custody. The Department of Homeland Security said the device targeted “the aviation sector.”

President Barack Obama was told of the plot in April, said Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council.

Not a Threat

“While the president was assured that the device did not pose a threat to the public, he directed the Department of Homeland Security and law enforcement and intelligence agencies to take whatever steps necessary to guard against this type of attack,” Hayden said in an e-mailed statement.

The Associated Press, citing unnamed U.S. officials, reported that the CIA seized the device before a would-be bomber based in Yemen chose a target or bought airplane tickets, and that the device was a more sophisticated version of the explosive that was smuggled in the underwear of an al-Qaeda operative on a U.S.-bound flight.

The device did not contain metal and that the FBI was studying whether it could have passed airport body scanners undetected, said the AP, which first reported the story.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, an offshoot of bin Laden’s terror organization, also attempted to evade airline security with bombs concealed in toner cartridges in 2010.
Failed Plots

Intelligence helped uncover the printer equipment smuggled aboard two cargo flights from Yemen, and a failed detonation alerted fellow passengers who subdued the would-be bomber aboard a Detroit-bound jet originating in Amsterdam.

The administration previously said there were no indications that militants would use the May 2 anniversary of bin Laden’s killing by a U.S. Navy SEAL team in Pakistan to stage an attack.

White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters on April 26 that “we have no credible information that terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, are plotting attacks in the U.S. to coincide with the anniversary of bin Laden’s death.”

He said al-Qaeda affiliates “remain intent on conducting attacks in the homeland, possibly to avenge the death of bin Laden, but not necessarily tied to the anniversary.”

Obama’s counter terrorism adviser John Brennan said in an April 30 speech in Washington that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is the terrorist group’s “most active affiliate, and it continues to seek the opportunity to strike our homeland.” He did not mention any bomb plot around the anniversary.

Maine Senator Susan Collins, the top Republican on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano didn’t draw a connection between the anniversary of bin Laden’s death and the plot when she briefed members of Congress.

“It’s a credit to the intelligence-based approach that we are taking to airplane security that the plot was thwarted before it could be carried out,” Collins said.

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...