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Globally, alcohol consumption causes significant societal harm and is a leading risk factor for death and disability in adults. In India, 3.7% of all deaths and 3.1% disability adjusted life years (DALYs) can be attributed to alcohol. In the context of rapid economic development and emphasized by the COVID-19 pandemic, India's lack of a consolidated and comprehensive alcohol policy has posed significant challenges to addressing this harm. In this context, the aim of our review was to undertake a comprehensive mapping of the State and national policy environment surrounding alcohol and its use in India, based on an analysis of policy documents. We did this though a scoping review of academic and grey literature, which helped to iteratively identify the websites of 15 international organizations, 21 Indian non-governmental organizations, and eight Indian Federal governmental organizations as well as State/Union Territory government sites, to search for relevant policy documents. We identified 19 Federal policy documents and 36 State level policy documents within which we have identified the specific policy measures which address the 10 categories of the World Health Organization's Global Action Plan to Reduce the Harmful Use of Alcohol. We found that there are major gaps in regulation of marketing and price controls, with much of this controlled by the States. In addition, regulation of availability of alcohol varies widely throughout the country, which is also a policy area controlled locally by States. Through the clear elucidation of the current policy environment surrounding alcohol in India, policy makers, researchers and advocates can create a clearer roadmap for future reform., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Schess et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

The evolving international economic instability and international trade relationship demand a nation to move towards a self-reliant integrated system at a sub-national scale to address the growing human needs. Given India's role in the global trade network, it is critical to explore the underlying extensive complex trade network at the domestic scale. The potential advantages of complex interaction among the different commodities remain unexplored despite the known importance of trade networks in maintaining food security and industrial sustainability. Here we perform a comprehensive analysis of agricultural flows in contrast with non-agricultural commodities across Indian states. The spatio-temporal evolution of the networks from 2010-2018 was studied by evaluating topological network characteristics of consistent spatially disaggregated trade data. Our results show an increase in average annual trade value by 23.3% and 15.4% for agriculture and non-agriculture commodities, respectively, with no significant increase in connectivity observed in both networks. However, they depict contrasting behavior concerning the spatio-temporal changes, with non-agriculture trade becoming more dependent on production hubs and the agriculture trade progressing toward self-reliance, which signifies the evolution of the diversification in the existing agrarian trade network. Our findings could serve as an important element in deepening the knowledge of practical applications like resilience and recovery by devising design appropriate policy interventions for sustainable development., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Kulkarni et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

The structure, interdependence, and fragility of systems ranging from power-grids and transportation to ecology, climate, biology and even human communities and the Internet have been examined through network science. While response to perturbations has been quantified, recovery strategies for perturbed networks have usually been either discussed conceptually or through anecdotal case studies. Here we develop a network science based quantitative framework for measuring, comparing and interpreting hazard responses as well as recovery strategies. The framework, motivated by the recently proposed temporal resilience paradigm, is demonstrated with the Indian Railways Network. Simulations inspired by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2012 North Indian blackout as well as a cyber-physical attack scenario illustrate hazard responses and effectiveness of proposed recovery strategies. Multiple metrics are used to generate various recovery strategies, which are simply sequences in which system components should be recovered after a disruption. Quantitative evaluation of these strategies suggests that faster and more efficient recovery is possible through network centrality measures. Optimal recovery strategies may be different per hazard, per community within a network, and for different measures of partial recovery. In addition, topological characterization provides a means for interpreting the comparative performance of proposed recovery strategies. The methods can be directly extended to other Large-Scale Critical Lifeline Infrastructure Networks including transportation, water, energy and communications systems that are threatened by natural or human-induced hazards, including cascading failures. Furthermore, the quantitative framework developed here can generalize across natural, engineered and human systems, offering an actionable and generalizable approach for emergency management in particular as well as for network resilience in general.

Human biospecimen collection, processing and preservation are rapidly emerging subjects providing essential support to clinical as well as basic researchers. Unlike collection of other biospecimens (e.g. DNA and serum), biobanking of viable immune cells, such as peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) and/or isolated immune cell subsets is still in its infancy. While certain aspects of processing and freezing conditions have been studied in the past years, little is known about the effect of blood transportation on immune cell survival, phenotype and specific functions. However, especially for multicentric and cooperative projects it is vital to precisely know those effects. In this study we investigated the effect of blood shipping and pre-processing delay on immune cell phenotype and function both on cellular and subcellular levels. Peripheral blood was collected from healthy volunteers (n = 9): at a distal location (shipped overnight) and in the central laboratory (processed immediately). PBMC were processed in the central laboratory and analyzed post-cryopreservation. We analyzed yield, major immune subset distribution, proliferative capacity of T cells, cytokine pattern and T-cell receptor signal transduction. Results show that overnight transportation of blood samples does not globally compromise T- cell subsets as they largely retain their phenotype and proliferative capacity. However, NK and B cell frequencies, the production of certain PBMC-derived cytokines and IL-6 mediated cytokine signaling pathway are altered due to transportation. Various control experiments have been carried out to compare issues related to shipping versus pre-processing delay on site. Our results suggest the implementation of appropriate controls when using multicenter logistics for blood transportation aiming at subsequent isolation of viable immune cells, e.g. in multicenter clinical trials or studies analyzing immune cells/subsets. One important conclusion might be that despite changes due to overnight shipment, highly standardized central processing (and analysis) could be superior to multicentric de-central processing with more difficult standardization.