From a pedagogic point of view, tales convey basic values useful for children lives. In a didactic perspective, properly chosen storybooks represent a valuable resource for school activities, improving students' language skills and building up a friendly/respectful classroom environment. Children stories are also used by health professionals for therapeutic purposes (bibliotherapy) to prevent unhealthy habits and addictions, or address psychosomatic disorders. Finally, storybooks and web-based/digital stories can be an effective vehicle for health contents, to encourage the adoption of healthy lifestyles among schoolchildren. Conclusion Children's literature and storytelling could be helpful in promoting students' global development and wellbeing, when included in school curricular activities. © 2020 The Author(s).National Nutritional Monitoring Bureau survey (2017) has found that more than half of the adults in India were overweight and obese. To halt this rising epidemic, development of various policy measures has been suggested in National action plan for prevention and control of noncommunicable diseases. One such measure is the introduction of fat tax which is a surcharge or tax placed on food and beverages containing high amounts of fat. Government of India has made various direct budgetary initiatives for boosting the sectors related to the production of items rich in fat, sugars and salt without realizing the potential public health consequences. Hence, increasing the taxes for unhealthy junk foods should encourage the people to take healthier food options which in turn lead to positive impact on health. However, fat taxationfaced several challenges during implementation in countries like Denmark, Hungary, France and United States. Major challenges were the taxation debate, setting tax limit and encroaching into the autonomy rights of people. Evidences have shown that taxation alone cannot bring down the burden of non-communicable diseases but should be combined with measures like subsidies and access to healthy food items, public health education campaigns and programmes. © 2020 The Author(s).Nipah instead was one of the most fatal outbreaks of diseases in the mankind which was initially assumed as Japanese encephalitis. A multidisciplinary exploration was done at several levels of microbiology, histopathology and genetics which led to the discovery of a new paramyxovirus named Nipah virus (NiV). The disease was primarily identified in Malaysia in 1998 and named after a village, Sungai Nipah. The main mode of transmission in the Malaysian outbreaks was thought to be the consumption of bat's dropping, urine and fruit partially eaten by pigs. In Bangladesh and northeast India, the virus was directly transmitted from bats to human through consumption of raw date palm juice. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/mk-4827.html To limit the epidemic, coordinated efforts by health care providers have become mandatory. This article gives a note about the NiV, its infection and on-going researches on its management strategies. Data were collected using electronic media consisting of articles, books and websites. © 2020 The Author(s).When learning a foreign language, words that are the hardest to learn are often the easiest to forget. Yet, there is also evidence that more challenging learning contexts can lead to greater long-term retention. Here, we investigate the effect of language difficulty on vocabulary retention by teaching participants novel words that varied in both imageability and similarity to a known language over a period of four weeks. We found that easier words (high-imageability and familiar) were generally retained better than harder words (low-imageability and unfamiliar). However, when words were fully learned during training, the more difficult unfamiliar words were later recalled with higher accuracy than easier familiar words. The effect of language difficulty on vocabulary retention therefore varies depending on how well words were initially encoded. We conclude that greater challenges can reap greater long-term rewards so long as learners establish a strong foundation during initial acquisition.BACKGROUND Cytokines and inflammatory mediators are the hallmarks of sepsis. Extracorporeal cytokine hemoadsorption devices are the newer clinical support system to overcome the cytokine storm during sepsis. AIM To retrospectively evaluate the clinical outcomes of patients admitted in intensive care unit with septic shock with different etiologies. METHODS The laboratory parameters including biomarkers such as procalcitonin, serum lactate and C-reactive protein; and the hemodynamic parameters; mean arterial pressure, vasopressor doses, sepsis scores, cytokine levels and other vital parameters were evaluated. We evaluated these outcomes among survivors and non-survivors. RESULTS Of 100 patients evaluated, 40 patients survived. Post treatment, the vasopressors dosage remarkably decreased though it was not statistically different; 34.15% (P = 0.0816) for epinephrine, 20.5 % for norepinephrine (P = 0.3099) and 51% (P = 0.0678) for vasopressin. In the survivor group, a remarkable reduction of biomarkers levels; procalcitonin (65%, P = 0.5859), C-reactive protein (27%, P = 0.659), serum lactate (27%, P = 0.0159) and bilirubin (43.11%; P = 0.0565) were observed from baseline after CytoSorb® therapy. A significant reduction in inflammatory markers; interleukin 6 and interleukin 10; (87% and 92%, P less then 0.0001) and in tumour necrosis factor (24%, P = 0.0003) was also seen. Overall, 28 (28%) patients who were given CytoSorb® therapy less than 48 h after onset of septic shock survived and the maximum duration of stay for 70% of these patients in intensive care unit was less than 15 d. CONCLUSION CytoSorb® is a safe and well tolerated rescue therapy option in patients with septic shock. However, early (preferably within less then 48 h after onset of septic shock) initiation could result in better clinical outcomes. Further randomized trials are needed to define the potential benefits of this new treatment modality. ©The Author(s) 2019. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.