‘Herd immunity’, a much discussed issue now the world over, and ‘R-naught’ (R0) – both the terms came up during a discussion on public health by Prof. Sangeeta Bhattacharya of the School of Medical Science and Technology, IIT Kharagpur. Prof. Bhattacharya, a double board certified physician in the US and Associate Faculty at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Baltimore, was talking on the importance of the coverage of public health during the recent Science Communication Conclave organized at IIT Kharagpur (Feb 28-29). The conclave sought to facilitate better communication between the scientific community and journalists.
During her talk at the Science Communication Conclave, Prof. Bhattacharya talked about the threat to public health from nCovid-19 and drew attention to the ‘herd immunity’ and ‘R-naught’ numbers for nCovid-19. Herd immunity is the number that describes how many people in a population need to be immune to that particular pathogen to prevent transmission. R-naught is the basic reproductive number of the pathogen and describes how contagious it can be.
The R-naught for measles, for example, is 18. For varicella zoster, or the virus that causes chicken pox, it is 16 and for mumps, it is 12. Compared to these, the R-naught number for nCovid-19, as understood now, is 2.7,.
Yet, the threat from nCovid-19 was far more than any of these. “ ‘How do you deal with a novel pathogen when there is no immunity in your population?’ That is the question that we are grappling with now,” said Prof. Bhattacharya while talking to KGP Chronicle recently.
The concept of herd immunity, said Prof. Bhattacharya, is used really in association with vaccines, specifically for vaccines for infections that one can catch from other people. “Vaccines are agents that are used to improve the herd immunity to a pathogen so that you stop spread. The number of people that need to be immune depends on the contagiousness of the pathogen or its R-naught value. For measles, which is highly contagious, 95% of the people need to be immune to prevent transmission. That is a near perfect immunization rate. Unfortunately, in our young adult population in colleges we do not see that number, so there is continued transmission of measles even though there is an excellent vaccine. We need strategies to implement these vaccines,” she pointed out.
She added, “Of course, you cannot have herd immunity for something like Tetanus which you catch from the environment and not from other people.”
The Oxford Vaccine Group of the University of Oxford writes in its website on ‘Vaccine Knowledge Project: Authoritative Information for All’ that “When a high percentage of the population is vaccinated, it is difficult for infectious diseases to spread, because there are not many people who can be infected. For example, if someone with measles is surrounded by people who are vaccinated against measles, the disease cannot easily be passed on to anyone, and it will quickly disappear again. This is called ‘herd immunity’, ‘community immunity’ or ‘herd protection’, and it gives protection to vulnerable people such as newborn babies, elderly people and those who are too sick to be vaccinated.”
This could happen in the case of Ebola, the other test case discussed by Prof. Bhattacharya at the Science Communication Conclave. The discovery, and the eventual use of rVSV-vectored vaccine, is likely to reduce the threat from this deadly virus in large parts of Africa. The vaccine was tried during Ebola outbreak in Guinea and it was found through the ring vaccine trial – where contacts, and contacts of contacts of the infected were vaccinated – that vaccination, even for those infected, reduced chances of death.
Such a thing is not yet possible to combat nCovid-19, which does not have a vaccine yet. So susceptibility of the human population to the disease was 100 per cent, said Prof. Bhattacharya.
“Covering public health as a journalist is enormously exciting, and probably very frightening as well because you have to get the information right as it impacts so many people,” said Prof. Bhattacharya to journalists at the Science Communication Conclave. For reliable information on the rapidly evolving scenario concerning nCovid-19, Prof. Bhattacharya referred WHO Situational Report, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Government of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Health Security.
For journalists covering public health, she advised, “If you are trying to understand what a particular research paper in public health is all about, then frame it the way researchers ask questions, which is PICO – the abbreviation for ‘Population’, ‘Intervention or Exposure’, ‘Comparison’ and ‘Outcome’.”
For example, while gauging the severity of air pollution, a journalist could ask if ‘In populations exposed to increased particulate matter such as PM2.5 or PM10 compared to populations not exposed, is there increased mortality?’
While defining the concept of ‘public health’, Prof. Bhattacharya cited the 1920s definition by Charles Edward Amory Winslow, Founder of the Department of Public Health at Yale, “The science and arts of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through organized efforts and informed choices of society, and organization, public and private communities, and individuals.”
To unitedly combat the threat from nCovid-19, we perhaps need to reiterate the importance of Dr Winslow’s emphasis on “organized efforts and informed choices of society, and organization, public and private communities, and individuals.”
The Clinical Biomarkers Discovery Laboratory at IIT Kharagpur is actively involved in using the newly emerged field of metabolomics, which is capable of providing biological end-point markers of the cellular processes that occur as a result of disease. The lab focuses on the use of metabolomics for comprehensive identification of disease biomarkers and understanding of the pathogenic mechanism underlying complex human diseases. Prof. Koel Chaudhury, who heads the lab, talks to the KGP Chronicle about how she has used the metabolomics approach to investigate women’s health, the progress her team has made and the future challenges. 
The approach to illness and disease management has changed considerably with the evolution of medicine. In the past, medicine was strictly practiced according to the symptoms presented by the patient and was essentially based on the individual expertise of the physician, and thus was known as intuition medicine. Presently, medicine is based on the evidence produced by scientific research which also include the clinical trials, and is termed as evidence-based medicine. Most of the medical treatments today are designed for the average patient using the “one-size-fits-all” approach. Unfortunately, this type of treatment is seen to be very successful for some patients but not for others. In future, medicine is to be practiced according to algorithms that will take into consideration the patient’s characteristics, e.g. their genome, epigenetics, microbiomes, proteomes, metabolomes, environments and lifestyle to make diagnostic and therapeutic strategies precisely tailored to individual patients. It is envisioned that this will lead to the emergence of an effective P4 (predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory) healthcare system.
Our team uses the multi-omics approach including quantitative proteomics, NMR and mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to identify robust biomarkers in serum/urine/tissues/exhaled breath condensates/bronchoalveolar fluid which can assist in early disease prediction, identify disease sub-categories and predict individual disease risk. We also use ‘omics’-driven studies to enhance our understanding of the disease pathogenesis and monitor the therapeutic effect of drugs so that personalized therapeutic strategies targeting the underlying disease etiology can be developed.
Some of the clinical research questions our team is presently addressing using the ‘omics’ approach are listed below:
In what stage of development is this research?
Our research is translational and interdisciplinary in nature. We have active collaboration with clinicians and faculty members of various departments within the Institute. The aim of our team is to carry out ‘omics’-driven translational health research which will provide the ideal platform to diagnose diseases early in a non/minimally invasive and cost-effective manner.
The Indo-French workshop at IIT Kharagpur brought together dynamic researchers working in different facets of EHD and/or in Microfluidics where they presented and shared their own research work with an objective to identify synergies and explore avenues for new innovations at the intersection of disciplines. The workshop was made possible through funding from the Indo-French Centre for the Promotion of Advanced Research (IFCPAR/CEFIPRA), a bilateral organisation set up by Government of India and Government of France to promote international collaborative research in advanced areas of Science &Technology.
Prof. Surjya K. Pal, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Professor-in-Charge, DHI Centre of Excellence in Adv Manuf Tech (http://www.coeamt.com ), Associate Dean, Alumni Affairs, Chairman, Steel Technology Centre, Executive Adviser, Science and Technology Entrepreneurs’ Park (STEP), added another feather to his cap recently. He has been appointed Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya Chair Professor of Manufacturing in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of IIT Kharagpur for 2019-22.
Conventionally, the academic world and the industry run parallel to each other, and the worlds do not converge. The WMG is where the academia and industry work together to bring success. It was Lord Bhattacharyya who pioneered this concept and steered it to phenomenal success through WMG, his brainchild. At the DHI CoE, we are following his footsteps.
WMG is officially the international research advisor of the Centre. We had discussions with Prof. Dave Mullins of WMG. He came to visit my lab along with Prof. Sujit Banerji and Prof. Barbara Shollock, both then with WMG, and took a lot of interest in my work. They proposed if we could jointly organize training program for industries. The DHI Centre is about to run programs customised for different industries, particularly for MSMEs. We are trying to see how WMG can help us evolve our curriculum for these training programs. Besides, WMG faculty are the co-supervisors of several doctoral scholars at IIT Kharagpur.
An alumni-endowed Chair tries to create an impact in any particular research area. For eg, when Vinod Gupta recently endowed the A.S. Davis Chair in Thermodynamics, he vividly recalled Prof. Davis’s way of working and his vision. The purpose of creating the A.S. Davis Chair was to further this vision. Similarly, when Prof. Tapan Bagchi instituted the Lord Bhattacharyya Chair of Manufacturing, he wanted to promote a specific vision which he thought would benefit the Institute from where Lord Bhattacharyya had graduated. So This Chair brings me a lot of honour as also the responsibility of working more intently with industry. My being the Associate Dean, Alumni Affairs, helps me forge a connection with the alumni as well. If they come forward and work with DHI Centre, it will flourish, which is the vision and wish of Prof. Bagchi. The DHI Centre is very close to my heart. I passionately look forward to its success.
As a former detention centre for freedom fighters during the Raj and then as the first Indian Institute of Technology that laid the foundation of the IIT system, IIT Kharagpur’s heritage is widely known and acknowledged. The academic building, together with a host of early structures in the campus, stands testimony to a momentous era. Do they bear any other secret?
But her interest in the architecture of the IITs also reflects a larger concern of hers. A licensed architect in both India and the US, with over a decade of experience in building reuse and renovation, Prof. Jain has worked on the restoration of a diverse range of historically significant buildings including Trinity Church in Boston, St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington DC, the Richardson-Olmsted Complex in Buffalo and the Jewett Art Center at Wellesley College. She is particularly interested in technical building investigations, preservation of large institutional sites and buildings of the recent past. While at IIT Kharagpur, she also gave a talk at the Department of Civil Engineering, pointing out that there were few structural engineers and even fewer mechanical engineers who could work on historical buildings.
Can there be looking ahead without looking back? The 73rd Independence Day of India could be a good time to ask the question. But as Prof. Anjali Roy’s just-released book on the ‘memories and post memories of Partition’ makes obvious, the question is a complicated one, for looking back itself is a complicated task.
One reason that has complicated the ‘looking back’ at Partition –a fact of history indissociable from Independence – is the deafening silence surrounding it. Part of this is because of the conscious erasure of the disturbing memories of Partition in order to promote the triumphalist narrative of Indian Independence that focuses on a few figures, such as Gandhi, Mountbatten, Jinnah, Nehru and others. The other is the survivors’ deliberate concealment of Partition traumas. 
Three young boys, almost painfully conscious of addressing what they believed was a way more mature audience than what they probably had in mind. Yet they represented a wisdom that is perhaps as tall as a mountain. The three of them were from “The 1947 Partition Archive”, a globally important organisation. The Partition Archive, a non-profit organization born at Berkeley, with an office in Delhi, has been collecting, preserving and sharing first-hand accounts of the Partition since 2010. The three bright young scholars, who have worked for the organization and continue to work with it, were invited to IIT Kharagpur’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences by Dr Somdatta Bhattacharya of the department for a workshop entitled “An Interaction with the Partition Archive” to convince students, and everyone willing to listen, about the necessity of recording the voices of all who have experienced the Partition. And to do that before it is too late.
IIT Kharagpur is keenly aware of the significance of oral history. In fact, it has its own oral history bank of Partition stories that has already seen an investment of more than two years of hard work. It is a work in progress and Prof. Anjali Gera Roy, the project’s initiator, sees her work as part of the worldwide initiative to record the stories of Partition. Concentrating on the “1.5 generation”, or the descendants who suffered the indirect impact of Partition, Dr Gera Roy’s project focuses on the social and psychological traumas experienced by the survivors of displacement, their feeling of “unhomeliness” caused by their uprooting from settled existence, their sense of loss of privilege and status, the loss of language and culture through the pressure to assimilate, and their relegation to an outsider status despite achieving economic success.
Lokesh also played for the audience the account of Kakali Basu from Pabna. She talked of the way Durga Puja was celebrated during her childhood – how Muslim boatmen, who would compose special jhumur songs for the occasion and hold boat races, participated in the occasion alongside the Hindus. Lokesh has also recorded the story of a displaced Buddhist who, inspired by his new homeland, initiated a new genre of Buddhist-Baul songs and poetry.
