Plan to utilize equipment at university for swine flu test

The State Health Department is planning to use the advanced laboratory equipment available at Madurai Kamaraj University for conducting swine flu tests.

Since the requisite machines for testing the samples were not available in private hospitals in the city, the officials of Directorate of Public Health have approached the university which has the ‘Real Time-PCR Test’ equipment needed to carry out A (H1N1) influenza tests.

Official sources told The Hindu here on Sunday that a team of health officials visited the MKU on Saturday to assess whether the proposal was feasible. The university has two PCR machine at the laboratories in School of Biological Sciences and the School of Biotechnology.

Asked about the proposed move by the Health Department, Vice-Chancellor R.Karpaga Kumaravel said, “The University is ready to extend its facility if the State Government is satisfied with our laboratory equipment. We have a social obligation to support the Health Department.”

A two-member team comprising Deputy Director of Health Services A. Palanichamy and faculty member of Madurai Medical College Jhansi Charles visited the university’s ascertain if the university’s equipment met the specifications given the Directorate of Public Health.

Even while agreeing to share the infrastructure, Dr.Karpaga Kumaravel said that the Health Department must arrange for the requisite trained manpower to carry out the swine flu tests.

When contacted, the Director of Public Health S.Elango said that the university would be the immediate option available for diagnosing swine flu. A senior faculty member at the university in the field of genomics P. Gunasekaran said that the Health Department has asked for BSL-3 bio-safety specification whereas the Real TimePCR machine in the university was only of bio-safety-2 level. “Our university is working in the field of molecular biology and not in pathogenic levels. Since the handling of machine is different in the case of swine flu, it is for the Health Department to decide. They will have to upgrade our PCR machine,” Dr. Gunasekaran said.

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Hybrids produced by invasive species

The ecological effects of invasive species are often well known, particularly their impact on native plants or animals. But the invaders sometimes make love as well as war: they mate with related local species, producing hybrids. And the effects of such hybridization have not been the subject of much study.

Now, research involving invasive and natives salamanders in the Salinas Valley of California shows how devastating this can be: the hybrids have voracious appetites and can practically wipe out other species.

Maureen E.Ryan and Jarrett R.Johnson of the University of California, Davis, and Benjamin M. Fitzpatrick of the University of Tennessee studied hybrids between native California tiger salamanders and barred tiger salamanders, brought in huge numbers from Texas beginning 60 years ago by California balit dealers. Tiger salamander larvae are high on a pond’s food chain, gulping down larvae of other species with their big mouths.

The researchers built artificial ponds, stocked them with salamanders and other species, notably the California newt and the Pacific chorus frog (both of which are found in the Salinas Valley) and monitored what happened. Their findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hybrid larvae had a greater effect on the newts and frogs than native salamander larvae did, nearly wiping them out. Hybrids even affected the survival of native salamanders in the ponds.

The implication is they’re ecologically quite different than the native species,” Ryan said.

That could spell trouble for other third-party” species in the valley, like the California red-legged frog and the Santa Cruz long-toed salamander.

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