Thesis / Dissertations (SEAMEO-TROPMED Projects)

Bone marrow is the soft, fatty tissue inside human bones. Stem cells are immature cells in the bone marrow that give rise to all of human blood cells. A bone marrow transplant is a procedure to replace damaged or destroyed bone marrow with healthy bone marrow stem cells. Now a days it is increasingly used as therapy for aplastic anaemia, various haematological malignancies, immunodeficiency syndromes and thalessaemia. "Auto" means "self." Stem cells are removed from patient own body before receive high dose chemotherapy or radiation treatment. After these treatments are done, patient stems cells are put back in their body. This is called a "rescue" transplant. Similar to autologous transplants are syngeneic transplants among whom the HLA-identical twin serves as the donor Autologous bone marrow transplants are preffered for patients who require high-level or marrow ablative chemotherapy to eradicate an underlying malignancy but have healthy, undiseased bone marrow. Autologous bone marrow transplants are also preffered when the immunologic antitumor effect on an allograft is not beneficial. Autologous bone marrow transplants are used most frequently to treat breast cancer, non-Hodkin's lymphoma and Hodgkin's disease.

Vaccination is a humans' resort to protect themselves against diseases which can be regarded as a deliberate attempt to maintain survival. In the earliest centuries where knowledge on infectious microorganisms was indistinct, men had sought desperately to overcome various plagues and pestilences. History has shown a few stages of event involving several scientists and key persons in the development of the first smallpox vaccine in 1798, Edward Jenner is named as the person who holds title to the first scientific attempt to control an infectious disease on a large scale by his work of cowpox vaccination and popularized vaccination thereafter!' However, this way of surviving has exist as early as in the 7 century when some Indian Buddhists drank snake venom in an attempt to become immune to its effect. Details are vague and the explanation was extremely scarce back then but it is understood now that the attempt may have been inducing toxoid-like immunity.

Autoimmunity is the failure of the body's immune system to recognize its own tissues as self and induction of an immune response against them. Any disease that results from such an aberrant immune response is termed an autoimmune disease

In the second edition of Dengue haemorrhagic fever: diagnosis, treatment, prevention and control, the World Health Organization' (WHO), dengue fever (DF) is defined as "an acute viral febrile disease frequently presenting with headaches, bone or joint and muscular pains, rash and leukopenia as symptoms,"while dengue haemorrhagic fever (DHF) is said to be characterized by four major clinical manifestations: high fever, haemorrhagic phenomena, often with hepatomegaly, and, in severe cases, signs of circulatory failure." Patients with DHF may develop dengue shock syndrome (DSS) which is a hypovolaemic shock due to plasma leakage.

When foreign antigen gains entry into the bod several important changes may by initiated , collectively known as the immune response , which result in the elimination of the alien antigen A remarkable feature of this phenomenon is the ability of the adult mammal to distinguish between its own antigens ( known as self antigen) and those external or foreign origin ( known as non self antigens) This means that as a general rule, antibody is selectively produced in response to foreign substances yet it is not produced to antigens that are recognized as "self