Despite having a strong public sector programme to contain the disease, tuberculosis still remains a cause of concern for India, which has nearly a quarter of the global burden of TB, health experts said.

Experts said measures which can help strengthen the fight against the disease include involvement of the private sector, more political commitment to create awareness and containing risk factors like malnutrition.

"TB is still a cause for concern. It is the sheer numbers in India and the associated problems like poverty which are responsible for this," Soumya Swaminathan, director, National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis, an organization under the health ministry, told IANS.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 2.2 million tuberculosis patients in India, which makes it the world's highest TB-burden country. TB killed 1.3 million people worldwide in 2012 and India alone accounted for 26 percent of the total cases.

She said that China and Brazil have done better in controlling TB in their respective countries and India needs to do more.

"In eight years, India has made tremendous progress as far as containing TB. But it needs to do much more," she added.

But R. S. Gupta, deputy director general (TB) in the health and family welfare ministry, said: "Treatment success rates have been above 85 percent for several years in the country."

Gupta told IANS that the overall quality of TB services, including human resources and systems for financial management are being strengthened.

To achieve the National Tuberculosis Programme's (NTP) ambitious goal of universal health care access for all people with TB by 2017, financial commitments must be maintained by all partners, including international agencies, he said.

The state-run tuberculosis control initiative of the government, NTP provides free of cost, quality anti-tubercular drugs across the country. More than 1.5 million people avail the facility at 13,000 centres.

Gupta said that the private sector should be involved more as most patients are being treated in private clinics.

Agreed Swaminathan, who said that the government needs to work in tandem with the private sector.

"Standard procedures need to be followed for notification of the disease and diagnosis, especially by private practioners," Swaminathan told IANS.

In 2012, India declared TB to be a notifiable disease. It means that with immediate effect all private doctors, caregivers and clinics treating a TB patient had to report every case to the government.

According to a recent WHO report, India has achieved the Millenium Development Goal (MDG) target for TB which says that the incidence of the disease should be falling. It is on track to reach the 2015 targets for reductions in TB prevalence and mortality.

But it added that India accounts for 31 percent of the estimated 2.9 million missed TB cases -- people who were either not diagnosed or diagnosed but not reported to NTP.

It is estimated that about 40 percent of the Indian population is infected with TB bacteria, the vast majority of whom have latent rather than active TB.

Listing the other steps needed, Swaminathan said: "Getting more political commitment and activism from civil society to create awareness about TB like it was done in the case of HIV/AIDS would be a great help."

India also needs to contain the risk factors associated with the disease. The biggest among them is malnutrition, which makes people more susceptible to the development of active TB. Tuberculosis patients have lower Body Mass Index (BMI), muscle mass and subcutaneous stores of fat.

"Malnutrition is the biggest risk factor and it has been overlooked," she said, adding that the "disease needs to be fought on a common platform by all stakeholders."

Modern fast paced lifestyle is leading to rising incidence of kidney stones in the world. Giving new hope to kidney stone patients engineers from Duke University in Durham have devised a way to improve the efficiency of lithotripsy .Lithotripsy is the medical procedure of demolishing kidney stones using focused shock waves.

The engineers after intensive research devised that all it took was cutting a groove near the perimeter of the shock wave-focusing lens and changing its curvature,

"We've developed a simple, cost-effective and reliable solution that can be quickly implemented on their machines," said Pei Zhong, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke University.

In laboratory tests, the researchers sent shock waves through a tank of water and used a fiber optic pressure sensor to ensure the shock wave was focusing on target.

They broke apart synthetic stones in a model human kidney and in anesthesised pigs and used a high-speed camera to watch the distribution of cavitation bubbles forming and collapsing - a process that happens too fast for the human eye to see.

During the past two decades, lithotripter manufacturers introduced multiple changes to their machines, but they couldn't improve effectiveness of kidney stone treatment.

While the current commercial version reduced 54 percent of the stones into fragments less than two millimeters in diameter, the new version pulverised 89 percent of the stones while also reducing the amount of damage to surrounding tissue.

A new study suggests eating fried and junk foods, that most of us love to gorge on, have enough trans-fats, salt and sugar to lead us to an early onset of obesity and related chronic diseases, in people with genetic risk.

Salt in fried food, however, is not the real problem, but, consuming trans-fats, or the 'bad fats' is a big threat.

A team of US researchers analysed data from 9,623 women in the Nurses' Health Study, 6,379 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and 21,426 women in the Women's Genome Health Study.

Participants filled out food frequency questionnaires, which was based on how often they ate fried food consumption - both at home and away from home. Body mass index (BMI) and lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, were also assessed. Genetic risk scores were calculated based on genetic variants associated with BMI.

The results of the study showed that regular consumption of fried foods was associated with higher BMI, after taking into account other dietary and lifestyle factors.

In addition, the study showed that the association between overconsumption of fried foods and obesity was particularly pronounced among people with a greater genetic predisposition to obesity. On the other hand, the genetic effect on BMI among those who ate fried foods more than four times a week was about twice as large compared with those who ate them less than once a week.

The study has been published in the British Medical Journal.

Many people dieting to reduce flab are put off by low-fat desserts, sauces and salad dressings for one simple reason: they are also low on flavour.

But help is at hand. Researchers have found a way to reduce fat without killing flavour or affecting the appearance and texture of these foods. And these items could soon hit the market.

The key to developing new, better-tasting, more eye-appealing and creamier reduced-fat sauces, desserts and salad dressings could lie in adjusting their calcium and acidity levels, according to a new study.

The study was conducted as part of the 247th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

As part of the study, the team reduced the fat content and calories in a model white sauce from 10 percent to 2 percent without sacrificing the look and feel of the food, an ACS statement said.

"By controlling pH and calcium content, we are able to regulate the interactions among fat droplets," Bicheng Wu, a graduate student and a member of the study team, was quoted as saying.

"This makes them stick together and form flocs, or clumps. We believe the water trapped inside these flocs makes the sauce seem fattier than it really is and preserves the look, feel and flavor."

Wu explained that fat plays various roles in determining the overall sensory attributes of food products.

"It carries flavors, so cutting the fat content lessens the intensity of the flavor. The appearance, meaning the opacity or lightness, of a food mixture largely depends on light scattering by fat droplets, so high fat content gives a milky appearance to a sauce or dressing."

She added that high fat content is also related to the thick, smooth and creamy feel in your mouth of many products, like pudding, due to the effect of fat droplets on how the liquid flows.

Yet another problem with cutting the fat content is that it doesn't make people feel as full, said D. Julian McClements of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and team leader.

"Due to the high calorie count in fat and how the body digests it, fat also affects the feeling of satiety," Wu said.

"Often we see people reacting to the texture of our low-fat sauce sample even before they taste it," he said. "They say, 'Wow! No way it's only 2 percent fat. It looks like custard! Can I try it?'"

McClements said the team soon plans extensive taste and smell tests. "Then we will be able to adjust the composition and incorporate other seasoning ingredients into the foods.

"Since this fat reduction is easy for us now, and the fact that our new products contain healthy ingredients that can be used in a wide range of products means there's a great potential to reach the market in the near future."

Scientists have created at least five new experimental substances, based on a tiny protein found in cone snail venom, that could someday lead to the development of safe and effective oral medications for treatment of chronic nerve pain.

They say that the substances could potentially be stronger than morphine, with fewer side effects and lower risk of abuse.

"This is an important incremental step that could serve as the blueprint for the development of a whole new class of drugs capable of relieving one of the most severe forms of chronic pain that is currently very difficult to treat," David Craik, Ph.D., who led the study, said.

His presentation is one of more than 10,000 scheduled to occur at the 247th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world's largest scientific society.

Craik, who is at the University of Queensland, explained that acute pain occurs when the nervous system is stimulated by a wound or injury and naturally subsides over time. In contrast, chronic neuropathic pain kicks in when the nervous system itself is damaged.

This type of pain - which is often triggered by diabetes, multiple sclerosis and other diseases - can last for months, years or even decades. Current treatments for chronic neuropathic pain have serious side effects and provide relief to only about one in every three patients, he said.

One possible solution that Craik and his colleagues are investigating comes from an unlikely source, the cone snail.

Cone snails are marine animals that use venom to paralyze their prey. This venom contains hundreds of peptides (small proteins) known as conotoxins. But in humans, Craik says some of these conotoxins appear to have analgesic effects.

So far, however, only one conotoxin-derived medication has been approved for human use. This drug, ziconotide, has one big drawback: It has to be infused directly into the lower part of the spinal cord - a clearly invasive procedure.

The team is working to develop a conotoxin-based drug that can be taken orally, which would be much more practical for patients. In previous research, they found a way to modify conotoxin peptides so they formed circular chains of amino acids. As a result, the modified peptides - which are essentially tied into a loop - are extremely stable and resistant to enzymes in the body.

In laboratory rats, a common stand-in for humans in many experiments, a single, small oral dose of a prototype drug based on one of these looped conotoxins appeared to significantly reduce pain, as measured by a standard protocol.

Based on this research, the scientists concluded that this prototype drug was about 100 times more potent than morphine or gabapentin, the two drugs that are considered the "gold standard" treatments for chronic nerve pain.