The Study of Availability, Affordability and Price Variation of Essential Antibiotics in Bangladesh

The increased prices and low availability of medicines are main obstacles to health care system in developing countries like Bangladesh. The main goal of this work is to gather and assessing the data on availability, affordability and price variations of essential antibiotics in Bangladesh. The data will help to improve the availability and affordability of essential antibiotics for the mass peoples. The present work was done using standard methodology described in guideline, “Price measurement, availability and affordability and price components of medicines. A total of eighteen essential antibiotics were surveyed and their prices and availability were determined. Prices from 2003 to 2019 were collected from different sources to make a comparative study of the price variations over the years. The overall prices of essential antibiotics are not much higher than international reference prices. The rate of increase of price from previous years is not so alarming. The numbers of manufacturing companies were collected from the Bangladesh National Formulary (BDNF) of different Volumes to compare the increasing number of manufacturers. Essential antibiotics affordability was determined by comparing the total cost of treatment of a particular disease to the monthly salary of the lowest paid unskilled laborer. There are several essential antibiotics for which the numbers of manufacturing companies are increasing in very high rate. This type of survey may be expanded to the national level for the data of different regions of Bangladesh.

The Irish and the Common Schools

The reformers had set out on their crusade for common schools in the middle 1830s, a time when the American white population was still relatively homogeneous. They did not pay special attention to the immigrants because there were too few immigrants to merit special concern. Beginning with the early 1840s, all this would change. A combination of factors had in the later thirties and forties made life not only uncomfortable but impossible in Ireland. An increase in population, several successive potato crop failures, legislation in England that forbade relief to Irish emigrés, a drop in the price of Irish grain, and new laws that allowed landlords to evict previously unevictable tenants set the stage for what would become one of the largest mass migrations of modern history. The wave of Irish immigration that began in the late 1830s would not subside until the middle 1850s. During the peak years of the influx alone (1846 to 1853), nearly 1¼ million Irish men, women, and children would disembark in the New World. Where there had been neither work nor land for the Irish in their own country or elsewhere in the British Isles, there appeared to be plenty of both in the New World. The immigrants would soon discover, however, that the work was of the most menial, degraded, and underpaid variety, and the land, though abundant, cost far more than they could afford. The Irish found work in the coastal cities where they disembarked. They excavated “ditches for gas and water mains, or were taken in gangs to dig canals or prepare the track of new railroads, or served as engine crews in the omnipresent steamboats. Throughout the [antebellum] period their brawn was laying the foundation for the new material civilization of America.” Across the country the pattern was the same. The Irish filled the unskilled laborer jobs, those with the least security, requiring the least skill, and paying the lowest wages. In Newburyport, Massachusetts, foreigners accounted for almost two-thirds of the common laborers. The majority of these were Irish. In Boston, over four-fifths of the laborers enumerated in the 1850 census had been born in Ireland.

Awareness of HIV/AIDS among the grass-widows

The migrant workers in Bangladesh are at high risk of getting HIV infection due to factors like staying away from family for long periods which leave them vulnerable towards sexual relationship with commercial sex workers (CSW) and having sexual relationship with other men (MSM). This paper aimed to explore the level of awareness on HIV/AIDs among the women whose husbands stay apart from them for over a period of 6 months. For this cross sectional study, women attending public and private hospitals in Dhaka city were selected purposively. The participants were interviewed using a partially open-structured questionnaire. A total of 404 subjects were interviewed. Most of the respondents were housewives (85.7%). The higher education group had a high prevalence of awareness (>=HSC vs. SSC: 45.0% vs. 8.5%; p<0.001). The prevalence of awareness was significantly higher among the employed than the housewives (50% vs. 12.4%, p<0.001). Although the wives of the unskilled labor and the skilled employee were equal (25% vs. 25%), the wives of skilled employee had significantly higher awareness than the wives of the unskilled laborer (30.7 vs. 10.9%, p = 0.001). The study concludes that higher awareness level was significantly associated with higher education of the participants and higher education of the husband. Occupationally, housewives were found to have very low level of awareness compared with the employed group of participants. Again the wives of skilled employees had a significantly higher prevalence of awareness compared with the wives of unskilled laborer.Ibrahim Med. Coll. J. 2011; 5(1): 25-28 Key Words: HIV/AIDs; awareness; grass-widows.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/imcj.v5i1.9858

Nature and Aims of the National Socialist German Labor Party

The last election to the Reichstag brought the unexpected and rather extraordinary rise of the National Socialist German Labor party from twelve to 107 seats. It is the party of the extreme right. In nationalistic radicalism, it compares with the German National People's party, led by Hugenberg, much as in social radicalism the Communist party compares with the Social Democrats. Until recently, the National Socialists could be passed over as a negligible group of fanatics. But the party's present importance as the second strongest in the Reichstag, and the contradictory and confused ideas that are current about it, make worth while some inquiry into its nature and the causes of its rapid advance.To start with, the party differs from its rivals in that personal leadership and military discipline are at its foundations. Besides having contributed more than any other single man to the building up of the party, Adolf Hitler is also its leader in the strictest sense of the word. A few facts about his life may show how it was that he could become the exponent of so large a number of German people.Hitler was born in Austria in 1889 and until his fifteenth year lived in modest bourgeois surroundings, his father being a lower state official. This explains why he always has been, and still is, at heart a man of the middle classes. After the death of his parents, he was forced to earn his living as an unskilled laborer, and for some five years he lived the life of a proletarian among proletarians, completely cut off from his former middle-class environment.