Take precautions against the H1N1 (Swine Flu) Virus.

Today in every one mind’s only one question would be going one i.e. is there a test for H1N1?

The answer is Yes. A simple nasal swab is all that is needed; it will be sent to a laboratory to test for the virus.

Well, H1N1 is highly contagious. The viruses are spread person-to-person primarily when infected persons cough and/or sneeze. Persons may become infected by touching something with flu viruses on it and then touching their mouth or nose. You cannot get H1N1 by eating pork.

Yes. Antiviral drugs can make you feel better faster. Antiviral drugs work best if started within two days of onset of symptoms. Presently, the CDC is working on the development of a vaccine. AU Health Services are monitoring the CDC's progress.

According to them, when the vaccine is first available, the following groups will be the priority:

•pregnant women

•people who live with or care for children younger than 6 months of age

•health care and emergency services personnel
•persons between the ages of 6 months through 24 years of age, and

•people from ages 25 through 64 years who are at higher risk for H1N1 Swine Flu because of chronic health disorders or compromised immune systems.


The H1N1 Swine Flu virus is rare in healthy persons over the age of 65. For this reason, people 65 and over are not in the high risk priority group for initial receipt of the vaccination. An adequate supply of vaccine supplies is expected, so that it will be offered to the general population as additional supplies are received.

Following recommendations should be taken to all the residents in India & abroad:

•Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.

•Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hand cleaners are also effective.

•Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth.

•Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
If you become ill and are pregnant, are very young, or have a chronic health problem you should contact your health care provider. If you develop any of the following symptoms, you should seek immediate medical care:


•A high fever

•Children and Adults: Greater than 105°F (40.5°C)

•Babies 3- to 24-months-old: 103°F (39.4°C) or higher.

•Babies up to 3 months: Rectal temperature of 100.4°F (38°C) or higher.

•Coughing that produces thick mucus

•Dehydration (feeling of dry mouth or excessive thirst)

•Worsening of an existing serious medical condition (for example: heart or lung disease, diabetes, HIV, cancer)

•New onset of confusion

•Difficult breathing or chest pain

•Bluish skin

•Stiff neck

•Inability to move an arm or leg

•New onset of seizures


Note: Precaution is better than Cure

The Ways Babies Bond

When you're a new parent, it often takes a while to understand your newborn's true capabilities and all the ways you can interact:

• Touch becomes an early language as babies respond to skin-to-skin contact. It's soothing for both you and your baby while promoting your baby's healthy growth and development.
• Eye-to-eye contact provides meaningful communication at close range.
• Babies can follow moving objects with their eyes.
• Your baby tries — early on — to imitate your facial expressions and gestures.
• Babies prefer human voices and enjoy vocalizing in their first efforts at communication. Babies often enjoy just listening to your conversations, as well as your descriptions of their activities and environments.

Bonding with your Baby.

Bonding is the intense attachment that develops between parents and their baby. It makes parents want to shower their baby with love and affection and to protect and nourish their little one. Bonding gets parents up in the middle of the night to feed their hungry baby and makes them attentive to the baby's wide range of cries.

Scientists are still learning a lot about bonding. They know that the strong ties between parents and their child provide the baby's first model for intimate relationships and foster a sense of security and positive self-esteem. And parents' responsiveness to an infant's signals can affect the child's social and cognitive development.

Why Is Bonding with Baby is Important?

Bonding is essential for a baby. Studies of newborn monkeys who were given mannequin mothers at birth showed that, even when the mannequins were made of soft material and provided formula to the baby monkeys, the babies were better socialized when they had live mothers to interact with. The baby monkeys with mannequin mothers were more likely to suffer from despair, as well as failure to thrive. Scientists suspect that lack of bonding in human babies can cause similar problems.

Most infants are ready to bond immediately. Parents, on the other hand, may have a mixture of feelings about it. Some parents feel an intense attachment within the first minutes or days after their baby's birth. For others — especially if the baby is adopted or has been placed in intensive care — it may take a bit longer.

But bonding is a process, not something that takes place within minutes and not something that has to be limited to happening within a certain time period after birth. For many parents, bonding is a byproduct of everyday care-giving. You may not even know it's happening until you observe your baby's first smile and suddenly realize that you're filled with love and joy.

What Your Newborn Looks Like?

You've been waiting for this day for months: Finally you get to meet your new baby. But like many new parents, you might not have a clear idea of what that meeting will be like.

Wondering how your baby will look and what he or she will do after arriving?

Although you may have visions of a robust bouncing baby, reality may not match that image. Many newborns are tiny, wet creatures when they first emerge. Often their heads are slightly pointed as a result of passing through the birth canal. This is only temporary — the head will take on a rounded appearance within a few days. It may surprise you that a newborn's head is so big compared with the rest of the body.

Your baby also may look scrunched up since the legs and arms have been kept bent at the knees and elbows while in the womb. After months of growing in ever-tightening close quarters, this is perfectly normal. The limbs will straighten out as your baby grows.

Look at your baby's tiny fingers and toes. You'll notice the paper-thin — and sometimes long — nails.

Your baby's skin may have one of several possible appearances, looking somewhat red, pink, or purple at first. Some babies are born with a white coating called vernix caseosa, which protects their skin from the constant exposure to amniotic fluid in the womb. The vernix is washed off with the baby's first bath. Other babies are born very wrinkled. And some, especially premature babies, have a soft, furry appearance because of lanugo, a fine hair that develops while in the womb. Lanugo usually comes off after a week or two.

Rashes, blotches, or tiny white spots also are common on newborns. These generally clear up over the first few days or weeks after birth. The doctor will examine your baby within the first 12–24 hours of birth and make sure that any rashes or spots are normal.

Remember, your baby's appearance will change dramatically over the next weeks as he or she grows. The limbs will extend, the skin tone will probably change, and the blotches will disappear.

The fact of life concerning Love.

The first and most fundamental fact of life about love is: love is something that is fundamentally wired into the human brain. There is nothing that you can do about it. You cannot turn it on and off. It is there, it is active and that’s the end of it. In fact, it is nearly impossible to separate love from human existence. Especially as a teenager, they are one and the same.

The second fact of life is that there are different kinds of love, and we need to agree on what we are talking about when we say the word "love." Here are some of the different kinds of love that you might be familiar with:

• Parental love—Parents love their children, and this sort of love, devotion and caring is different from all other types of love. When done well, parental love could be called perfect.
• Christian love—Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and many people are able to do that. They love and care about those around them because they are fellow human beings.
• Friendship love—A deep friendship between two people often involves a level of trust, devotion, commitment and caring that is love. So two women or two men or a man and a woman who have known each other for 20 years and have been through a lot together can say they love one another. There is not a bit of romantic or sexual attraction involved.
• Material love—You might hear someone say, "I love that car!" or "I love that movie!" It is love applied to an object. In this case the word "love" can mean a range of things from "I really like it" to "I must have it" all the way up to, in extreme cases, "I will (literally) kill myself if I don’t get it." Another word for this is infatuation.
• Lustful love—To some extent lustful love is a form of material love, but it is applied to another person and tied almost completely to a sexual infatuation. So a girl might say, "I love Tom Cruise!" Or a guy might say, strictly on the basis of a girl’s looks, "I love that girl!" This is lust.
• Romantic love—When most teenagers think of "love", this is what they are talking about. It is the combination of friendship, sexual attraction and the search for someone to marry. It is the search for the one person with whom you can raise your family and spend the rest of your life.

Tips for Family Communication

Good communication starts with time spent together.

• Perhaps one of the best daily times for conversation is mealtime. Guidelines need to be set that open the way for conversation to take place -- such as no TV, radio, reading material, or toys at the table. Another gambit for conversation is open-ended questions such as: What was the best part of your day? Or what was your least favorite part of your day? Even young children can participate in such discussions.
  
  With busyness of life, many families don’t eat any meals together. Parenting includes making this a priority as often as possible. If daily family dinner doesn’t work on a regular basis, maybe Saturday or Sunday breakfasts can be together times. Parents may want to make individual “dates” with teenagers just to get that time to converse with them.
  
  
• Plan family activities where all members are present. Go for walks or bike rides, play games, and even be spectators at the children’s activities. These can be family events, where all can participate and communicate together. Taking excursions, like a picnic or a family vacation can be great events for conversation. Include all family members in the planning stage to heighten the opportunities for communication and lessens misunderstanding. Learn about the likes, dislikes, fears, and expectations of family members. The discussion can center on what activities are available in the area you are traveling to that might appeal to various members of the family.
  
  
• When communicating with children, learn how to communicate on the child’s level. Even the youngest children want to be heard and often have a lot to say. When possible, get down to their level or move them up to your level so that you can look them in the eye while talking to them. The child wants to see that you are indeed listening to them, as any adult wants to know. Teenagers respond to people who will communicate about issues that are important to them. All individuals appreciate being listened to without interruption, judgment, correction, and condescension. How awful it would be to have stopped the flow of wonderful sharing conversation just by criticizing the manner in which it was presented!

Parents can teach children from a young age that it is acceptable and helpful to share emotions in their conversation. If they are taught to express that the monster in the closet is fearful to them, without feeling silly or overly childish, they will be more likely to share what is fearful to them as they grow older. If they are taught to put their feeling into words early in life, they will be more apt to share those emotions as they grow older. When parents react in anger, disgust, or shock as their teenager confides in them, the teenager is much less likely to confide in them the next time.

Respectful conversation can and should be practiced within the family unit in order for it to exist outside of the household. Listening to each family member speak without interruptions, encourages, more than one viewpoint and these are skills that can be learned in the course of good family communication.

Confidence is important

Have you often admired the person who is friendly, relaxed and talks easily in a crowd? Most of us have wished that we had more of these outgoing attributes to help us in our work and daily lives.

Confidence comes easily and naturally for some, for many others it seems impossible. The good news is that it is a habit that can be learned to some degree by anyone. It will take some training and practice, but what a great way to be more successful and to feel better.

"The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. Without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience - true life is impossible." - Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)

A great source for learning self-confidence is of course books. You haven't been alone in the need for information on improving your ability to interact positively with people and there are numerous self-help books available to get you started. Just take an easy approach and read a variety of the best sellers that you feel will benefit you the most.

Using autosuggestion, by repeatedly filling the mind with thoughts of calmness and composure, can improve self-assurance. Picture in your mind, as vividly as possible, a scene in which you are performing very successfully. Picture this again and again so that your mind is totally occupied with your easy performance. This will push out doubt as there is not room for both trains of thought. Every time a negative thought pops up, immediately replace it with positive thoughts.

Affirmations are a similar technique that can work wonders. This is the repeating of positive words about yourself, concerning what you wish to do. The words cram the mind with confident thoughts that have a direct effect on how you feel and act. As an example, if you have to make a presentation - ' I have nothing to lose. They like me and I feel good and comfortable with these people. I am concentrating on them, not on myself. They are not here to be critical of me. I am doing everything slowly, calmly, surely. I am relaxed and breathing deeply and easily. I feel confident about this and am in control.'

"They can because they think they can." - Vergil (BC)

Meaning of Life

The meaning of life is deeply mixed with the philosophical and religious conceptions of existence, consciousness, and happiness, and touches on many other issues, such as symbolic meaning, ontology, value, purpose, ethics, good and evil, free will, conceptions of God, the existence of God, the soul and the afterlife. Scientific contributions are more indirect; by describing the empirical facts about the universe, science provides some context and sets parameters for conversations on related topics. An alternative, human-centric, and not a cosmic/religious approach is the question "What is the meaning of my life?" The value of the question pertaining to the purpose of life may be considered to be coincidental with the achievement of ultimate reality, if that is believed by one to exist.

What is life?

Even though we all seem to know what is meant by saying something is "alive", it's not very easy to describe what "life" is. It's almost as hard as describing where life came from. In another sense, living things do not die: they begin again, from a tiny cell, and scavenge the dust, the air and water, to find the elements necessary to fashion an aspidistra, an elephant, or an attorney-general, using only the raw materials to hand and energy from a thermonuclear reactor 93 million miles away. The freshly minted, self-replicating organism then grows up, grows old and melts away, but not before imparting a fragment of itself to generate yet another copy, but not an identical copy. The process is visible and transparent, everywhere on the planet, but it is ultimately mysterious. It has been going on for at least 3.5bn years, but researchers may never satisfactorily explain how it ever got started.

The mystery may endure because, once up and running, the life machine kicked up enough dust to cover its original tracks. It altered the air, muddied the water and recycled the rocks around it. For at least 30 centuries, thinkers ascribed the beginning of life to an extraterrestrial agency: they talked of the hand of God, the divine afflatus, the vital spark, or of "seeds" of life travelling through the cosmos. By 1850, however, chemists, physicists, geologists and biologists - many of them deeply religious, and all of them familiar with the religious tradition - had begun to take the problem seriously, and concluded that complex life had in some sense evolved from simpler beginnings, exploiting the materials around it for its own survival.

But as far as we know, life exists on Earth and nowhere else. This is a puzzle because, at one level, the universe looks as though it was set up to generate life. In the first place, the constants of physics are so finely tuned that, were they even infinitesimally different, there would be no stars or planets, no carbon atoms, no oxygen, no aspidistras, elephants or attorney-generals. In the second place, the space between the stars - where no life could ever exist - is rich in life's prime ingredients: the organic chemicals. Astronomers have identified more than 100 of these, including cyanide, formaldehyde, alcohol, ammonia, and acetylene. Comets are rich in hydrocarbons. A meteorite that fell to Earth in Australia in 1969 has so far yielded more than 70 amino acids. These are the building blocks of protein. In 1953, two Chicago chemists filled a flask with ammonia, methane, water and hydrogen - the Earth's primitive atmosphere must have contained all these - and ran an electric current through it. After just a week, they had 13 of the 22 amino acids that are the constituents of protein, the stuff of all living material. If that happened in one week in one laboratory, they reasoned, it could certainly have happened through a billion years of lightning strikes.

But it is a big jump from life's building blocks to self-replicating, planet-altering life, so big that the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle famously argued that life had as much chance of emerging from a chemistry set by accident, as a jumbo jet had of appearing from a windstorm in a junkyard. Yet life exists, it shares a common biochemistry, and species are grouped in such a way as to suggest common ancestry. But how it began, and precisely when and where, remains a mystery.

Life looks after itself, but humans look after the classification of life, and humans argue.

Read it carefully

If I had my life to live over, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax; I'd limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I'd have fewer imaginary ones.

You see, I'm one of those people who lived sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I had my moments, and if I had to do it over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after the other, instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hot water bottle, a raincoat, and a parachute. If I had it to do over again, I would travel lighter than I have.

If I had my life to live over again, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dance; I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.

The story behind this quotation

Love

Love is patient, love is kind. It has no envy, nor it boasts itself and it is never proud. It rejoices over the evil and is the truth seeker. Love protects; preserves and hopes for the positive aspect of life. Always stand steadfast in love, not fall into it. It is like the dream of your matter of affection coming true. Love can occur between two or more individuals. It bonds them and connects them in a unified link of trust, intimacy and interdependence. It enhances the relationship and comforts the soul. Love should be experienced and not just felt. The depth of love can not be measured. Look at the relationship between a mother and a child. The mother loves the child unconditionally and it can not be measured at all. A different dimension can be attained between any relationships with the magic of love. Love can be created. You just need to focus on the goodness of the other person. If this can be done easily, then you can also love easily. And remember we all have some positive aspect in us, no matter how bad our deeds maybe. And as God said "Love all"