A study on drinking water quality in different income groups of Vizianagaram region of India.

Portable clean water consumption is the basic right of every individual. The major global concern is water pollution which can cause mortality. Change in physicochemical characteristics in drinking water is not only a pollution problem, but the presence of antibiotic-resistant microbes is also a significant issue. The study was carried out to assess the physicochemical and microbiological quality of the reservoir, municipality-supplied water, and bottled water. A total of 100 samples were collected from different income classes (higher, medium, and low) groups. The experiments were carried out based on the guidelines of APHA. In the present study, 40% of samples have been found to be contaminated with bacteria such as Escherichia coli, Vibrio cholerae, and Enterobacter aerogenes. Moreover, these bacteria also showed antibiotic resistance to certain drugs. The percentage of isolated bacterial strains was resistant to amoxicillin and ampicillin antibiotics. The statistical analysis of the Chi-square test states that there is a significant correlation between E. coli and other microbes (p ≤ 0.5). This study gives a piece of baseline information about the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and focuses on the improvement of water from purification before reaching the consumer.

Finite Element Modeling of scattered electromagnetic waves for stroke analysis.

Stroke has become one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide and about 800 in every 100,000 people suffer from stroke each year. The occurrence of stroke is ranked third among the causes of acute death and first among the causes for neurological dysfunction. Currently, Neurological examinations followed by medical imaging with CT, MRI or Angiography are used to provide better identification of the location and the type of the stroke, however they are neither fast, cost-effective nor portable. Microwave technology has emerged to complement these modalities to diagnose stroke as it is sensitive to the differences between the distinct dielectric properties of the brain tissues and blood. This paper investigates the possibility of diagnosing the type of stroke using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The object of interest is a simulated head phantom with stroke, created with its specifying material characteristics like electrical conductivity and relative permittivity. The phantom is then placed in an electromagnetic field generated by a dipole antenna radiating at 1 GHz. The FEM forward model solver computes the scattered electromagnetic field by finding the solution for the Maxwell's wave equation in the head volume. Subsequently the inverse scattering problem is solved using the Contrast Source Inversion (CSI) method to reconstruct the dielectric profile of the head phantom.