Asia Life Sciences

Abstract : Surrogacy is a practice where a woman, known as a surrogate mother, carries a child for another with intent of handing over the child after birth. Traditionally it was meant to be the last option for infertile couples or when pregnancy was either not possible or risky due to medical condition of the woman. With the advances in ART (Artificial Reproduction Technology), it began to be used by others like same sex couples, singles, divorced, widowed or aged persons or anybody who wished to have a child by surrogacy in exchange of some monetary incentive to the surrogate mother. The increased demand led to the emergence of a commercial surrogacy market, with the purpose to “rent a womb” and “sell a child”. It raised serious legal, ethical, moral and religious issues leading to banning or strictly regulating all forms of surrogacy by most of the developed countries of the worldwide. In 2002 Supreme Court of India legalized commercial surrogacy in India to boost its ‘medical tourism industry’. India soon became a global ‘Surrogacy hub” leading to large number of foreigners flocking to India to hire surrogate mothers and avail surrogacy services at much lower cost than the developed countries. In the absence of any strict legislation, the ART (infertility) clinics began to rampantly misuse surrogacy to exploit women of economically weaker sections, who were lured or coerced into surrogacy by intermediaries hired by the clinics. Our paper examines the commercialization of surrogacy, making India a global ‘surrogacy hub’

Abstract : The utilization of both plant extracts and phytochemicals, with remarkable antimicrobial properties, can be of great importance for therapeutic applications, particularly in the treatment of diseases caused by Multidrug resistant microorganisms. The frame work of the current study was mainly designed to study the efficacy of some naturally existing plant derived, fungal derived and algal derived antimicrobial substances against the multidrug resistant microorganisms isolated from diabetic foot lesions of the patients. The pus samples collected from diabetic foot lesion patients in a Tertiary care hospital were processed immediately in the Microbiology laboratory for the isolation and identification of pathogens through morphological, cultural and biochemical characterization. Antibiotic susceptibility pattern of isolated pathogens was checked by Kirby Bauer disc diffusion method using Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) guidelines. Different naturally available compounds like Honey, spices, spirulina and mushroom were used to determine their antibacterial activity against the wound isolates through agar-well diffusion method at varying test concentrations against Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, E. coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Proteus mirabilis, Coagulase negative staphylococci, Enterococcus faecalis, E. coli 25922 and S.aureus 25927. The results obtained in the current study propose that bioactive and structurally diverse fungal metabolite i.e. mushroom extracts, herbal products like spices showed mild antibacterial activity while to honey and spirulina at highest concentrations. The study helps in the development of valuable pharmaceutical products and may be one of the better options for treating the infections caused by multidrug resistant bacterial isolates