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Background: India intends to start its 1 st dose of vaccination against Covid-19 on January 16 th , 2021 prioritizing its frontline health care professionals with either of the two vaccines—Covaxin or Covishield. Whenever a new vaccine is launched, it is marred with controversy and myths. To understand the doubts and concerns better, this study was conducted on health care professionals working in a tertiary care hospital. Materials and Methods: Willing respondents, who are working in the institute, were administered the questionnaire asking their views on knowledge, beliefs, and reasons for hesitancy regarding Covid-19 immunization. A Likert scale was used to quantify the responses regarding participants’ knowledge, beliefs, and hesitancies regarding immunization with the available vaccines. Data were analyzed using MS office Excel sheets and JASP software was used to analyze the data thus obtained. Results: Out of 122 complete responses, we had 73 (60%) doctors, while 30 (24%) were nursing staff, the rest comprised of other health care workers, such as housekeeping staff, janitorial, etc., 66 (54%) respondents were unaware, while 25 (20%) respondents had hesitancy and 23 (18%) were having extremely negative views regarding vaccination. Some of the variables, such as age, role, marital status, gender, etc., were found to be possibly associated with these scores. Conclusion: Issues like concerns over vaccine safety, efficacy, reliability, etc., are deterrents for individuals and whole programme and vaccination drive across the nation. Time and again it has been seen that despite the vaccines’ contribution in breaking the transmission, concerns are making people either hesitant or unmotivated to get the vaccines. More dialogues from the authorities regarding the issues of concern may pave the way for more motivation to accept vaccination and increase the vaccination coverage.

Breastfeeding is an unequalled way of providing ideal food for the healthy growth and development of infants. The WHO recommends that for the first six months of life, infants should be exclusively breastfed to achieve optimal growth, development, and health. With the primary objective to identify breast feeding practices in mothers of infants 1-6 month of age, this cross-sectional study was conducted in three slums of three different districts of Delhi. A sample of 425 infants (1-6 months of age) and their mothers was selected by multi-stage sampling and primary data was collected over a period of 3 months from October 2018 to December 2018 by interviewing the mothers using a structured interview schedule. It was found that breastfeeding was initiated within one hour of birth in 39.6 % of the infants, Colostrum was given to 80.0 percent of the infants and the rate of exclusive breastfeeding was found to be 66.4 percent, which is much less than the desired optimal practice. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that more focus should be given on interpersonal communication, health education and social and behaviour change communication regarding breastfeeding practices at different levels and orientation and training of health personnel regarding optimal breastfeeding practices should be reemphasized.

We report here hematite-rich concretions observed in the sandstone of the Mesoproterozoic Vindhyan Supergroup of rocks occurring in parts of Bihariya, Uttar Pradesh, northern India. These concretions are similar to 'blueberries' from Mars and their terrestrial analogues reported from the Jurassic Navajo Sandstone in Utah, USA. The presence of diagenetically formed hematite concretions gave the first confirmation of the presence of liquid water in the red planet in the past. We report here the detailed morphology, petrography, mineral chemistry, magnetic susceptibility characteristics and spectral radiometric data of hematite-rich concretions observed in the Vindhyan sandstone. These are compared with 'blueberries' from Mars and other similar terrestrial analogues reported from different parts of the world. In spite of similarities, these hematite-rich concretions are strikingly distinct in having a nucleus and alternate iron-rich and iron-poor rims unlike other global occurrences. In addition, we document here outcrop scale evidence of possible fluid pathways considered responsible for the development of the concretions.

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