A large number of people living with HIV/AIDS residing in HBV endemic regions such as in India are highly susceptible to acquire co-infections like HBV but also transmit them to other due to their high risk behaviours. The present study aimed to estimate HBV prevalence and distribution of various HBV serological markers among HIV infected individuals. This cross sectional survey covered HIV infected individuals attending the largest HIV care center in India. Socio-demographic details and blood samples to screen for HBV seromarkers using commercial ELISA kits were collected. Among 1160 HIV infected patients, prevalence of HBcAb, HBsAb, HBsAg and HBeAg was 66, 29.4, 16.6 and 5.8 % respectively. Overall, 28.9 % individuals had no evidence of any of the four markers, indicating lack of previous exposure and future risk of acquiring HBV infection. Presence of anti-HBsAg in a mere 0.9 % of individuals reflected low levels HBV vaccine conferred immunity which could be due to poor HBV vaccine coverage in this high risk population. With high prevalence and evidence of exposure to HBV as well as considering the growing literature on increase in hepatic complications in HIV-HBV co-infected individuals, the need for mandatory HBV screening of all HIV infected individuals cannot be over-emphasised. The policy makers and HIV programme managers must consider HBV vaccination for newly detected HBV naive HIV infected individuals and also focus on creating public awareness on HBV and HIV prevention.

Current inadequate and inefficient market drugs used for the control and management of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) coinfection with hepatitis viruses (HBV) poses serious threats to public health. The medicinal plant Cardiospermum halicacabum,having known anticancer and immunostimulatory activity was explored for their control in this study. The plant active principles extracted using five solvents were identified, and tested for antiHIV, antiHBV and phytochemical constituents. Methanol extract inhibited both HIV-RT (91%) and HBsAg (79%) and has 11 compounds. Among the compounds, Benzene dicarboxylic acid yielded a dock score −4.85 against HIV receptor and −4.71 against HBV receptor. The obtained results indicated C. halicacabum bioactive principles potentiality as HIV and HBV co-infection controlling novel therapeutics lead compounds.

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Sampling frame is a complete list of items or population from which a sample is drawn. More often researchers face difficulties in getting an up to date line list of sampling units, especially in the field where rapid changes are frequent. In household surveys it is difficult as newly constructed houses are seen as a continuous process in urban as well as rural areas. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we proposed a novel method by using Google-Earth with the GIS technologies. A study was done with the primary objective to identify the health impact of people living in and around quarries/crusher units at Thiruneermalai region nearer to Chennai. Since the boundary of the study area is found to be radial, it was difficult in getting the complete line list of the people living within the required radius. To overcome the issue the entire region was divided into small 30 x 30 meter grid cells. A total of 43652 sampling units (grid cells) formed the sampling frame. Among them, the required sample size was selected for the study. This method of GIS based grid sampling serve as an alternate tool for developing sampling frame with no or least cost.