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Background: The national HIV scenario in India has improved impressively during past two decades. Contrastingly, the State-level HIV sentinel surveillance and routine programme data from various testing facilities indicated an increasing HIV prevalence among antenatal clinic attendees and female sex workers (FSWs) in three districts of Assam. Objectives: 1) To explore the reasons behind increasing adult HIV prevalence and 2) To understand the role of FSW and Migrants/long distance truckers as drivers of the HIV epidemic in these districts. Methodology: Three sources of data were utilized in this concurrent mixed methods study-1) existing programme data for past three years; 2) questionnaire-based data for a case-control study, where during past six months at designated testing facilities HIV(+) married women were "cases" and age-matched HIV(−) women from the same district were "controls". Spouses of these women were also interviewed separately; and 3) a qualitative study, where focus group discussions were conducted among FSWs, outgoing male migrant labourers and long-distance truckers. Results: The study revealed high levels of unsafe sexual practices among the FSWs. Sometimes in poverty-struck areas, women, not identifying themselves as sex workers, sold sex on a part-time basis to earn extra money for financial support and often remained invisible to the programme. The clients of the sex workers, male migrants and truckers also revealed various risk behaviours for *Chiranjeev Bhattacharjya was formerly with Assam State AIDS Control Society.

Background: Degenerative diseases most commonly affect the elderly. The management of these chronic diseases is also very expensive, thereby making it out-of-pocket expenditure for elderly persons. As the elderly population is likely to increase in the future, the concept of active and healthy aging needs to be promoted among the elderly. Objectives: To estimate the morbidity pattern of the elderly in an urban population of Barpeta, and to evaluate the different morbidity patterns of the young old and old old. Methods: The study was conducted in eight urban wards of Barpeta town using multistage sampling. From the urban wards, 150 elderly persons were selected according to proportionate to the size of the urban wards. Pretested and predesigned proforma was used to assess the morbidity pattern of the elderly. Result: Most of the system disorders were almost equally distributed among elderly males and females. Most common disorders were diseases of the eye and adnexa (46%) followed endocrine, nutritional, and metabolic (37.3%) diseases, and disease of the circulatory system (34.7%). Diseases of the respiratory system (10.1%) and genitourinary system (10.1%) were more common in males, whereas cataract (29.6%) and hearing impairment (9.9%) were more common in females. Conclusion: The prevalence of morbidity increases with increasing age. Early detection of morbidities among elderly and timely referral to secondary or tertiary care facilities by enhancing the capacity of primary health care providers are required to promote active and healthy aging.

The synthetic procedure of substantially diverse spiro[benzothiazolo[3,2-a]pyrimidine-4,3'-indolines] was created via a highly potent and ecologically friendly tandem technique. The synthesis methodology uses L-proline to serve as a recoverable and recyclable catalyst for the reaction of isatin, and malononitrile, with 2-amino benzothiazole using an aqueous environment.

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