India is a large country with each State having distinct social, cultural and economic characteristics. Tobacco epidemic is not uniform across the country. There are wide variations in tobacco consumption across age, sex, regions and socio-economic classes. This study was conducted to understand the wide inequalities in patterns of smoking and smokeless tobacco consumption across various States of India.

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Fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, and processed foods continue to be the major sources of essential trace elements in humans’ diet required for proper body development. However, food products can potentially be contaminated by toxic heavy metals (HMs) from environmental contamination or industrial food processing. The deleterious health implications of essential trace and macro elements’ deficiency and toxic consequences of HMs in humans necessitate proactive monitoring of the essential trace elements and HMs concentrations in the humans diet to ensure public health safety.

Estimation of extremely high rainfall (point or areal) is one of the major components of design storm derivation. The estimation of Probable Maximum Precipitation (PMP) involves selection of heavy rainstorms and its maximization for the moisture content during the rainstorm period. These heavy rainstorms are nothing but the widespread heavy rainfall exceeding a certain threshold value. The present study examines the characteristics of heavy rainstorms in the Indus basin selected from present climate

The objective of the study was to assess the operational integration of maternal HIV testing and syphilis screening in Mwanza, Tanzania. Interviews were conducted with 76 health workers (HW) from three antenatal clinics (ANC) and three maternity wards in 2008–2009 and 1137 consecutive women admitted for delivery. Nine ANC health education sessions and client flow observations were observed. Results: Only 25.0% of HWs reported they had received training in both prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) and syphilis screening.

There is something cyclical about the air pollution debate in Delhi - almost like the seasonal cycle of air pollution itself. When air pollution control slows down and the courts step in to demand action against the killer pollution, especially toxic vehicular fumes, the city gets swamped with 'scientific facts' to prove that all other pollution sources matter more than the vehicles. Instead of science becoming an enabler, it confounds action.

Short-term exposure to air pollution has adverse effects among patients with asthma, but whether long-term exposure to air pollution is a cause of adult-onset asthma is unclear. The researchers aimed to investigate the association between air pollution and adult onset asthma.

Ambient coarse, fine, and ultrafine particles have been associated with mortality and morbidity. Few studies have compared how various particle size fractions affect systemic biomarkers. The researchers examined changes of blood and urinary biomarkers following exposures to three particle sizes.

In order to support as critical input to air quality forecasting task during Commonwealth Games (CWG) – 2010 in mega city Delhi, we have developed a high resolution emission inventory of major atmospheric pollutants. For the same, inventories of ozone precursors like NOx and CO are developed over a domain of 70 km × 65 km with a grid of 1.67 km ×1.67 km resolution covering Delhi and surrounding region using Geographical Information System (GIS) technique for base year 2010.

The purpose of this study is to characterize heavy metals in ambient PM10 (particles with aerodynamic diameter below 10 µm) and PM2.5 (particles with aerodynamic diameter below 2.5 µm) particles in a typical integrated iron and steel industry zone (HG) and a background site (ZWY) during February 2011 to January 2012 in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region, China. Twelve elements were measured to study their levels, size distribution and sources. At the two sampling sites, Fe was found as the dominated metal in the total detected metals in both particle sizes, followed by Zn and Pb.

Seasonal variability of daily particle mass and saccharides and furfural concentrations in atmospheric particulate matter in both coarse aerosols (diameter > 2.4 µm) and fine aerosols (diameter