New Delhi:

The Delhi High Court has issued directives to combat the use of spurious Oxytocin hormone in the dairy colonies across the national capital, stressing the need to address animal cruelty and public health concerns.

A division bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet P.S. Arora ruled that administering Oxytocin without proper authorisation constitutes an offence under the relevant legislation.

The bench was dealing with a plea alleging violations of various laws in Delhi’s dairy colonies, filed by Sunayana Sibal, Asher Jessudoss, and Akshita Kukreja.

The court asked the Department of Drugs Control, GNCTD, to conduct regular inspections and ensure that cases of spurious Oxytocin usage or possession are registered under the pertinent laws.

Moreover, the Intelligence Department of the Delhi Police has been tasked with identifying the sources of Oxytocin and taking legal action against the offenders.

The plea pointed to the necessity of relocating dairies to areas with adequate infrastructure and sanitary conditions to safeguard public health and prevent animal cruelty.

Expressing concern over the dairies located near the landfill sites, the court stressed the urgency of relocating such facilities due to potential health hazards posed by contaminated feed and milk.

While acknowledging the need for relocation, the court deferred issuing binding directives pending further consultation with the relevant officials. The court also directed the key officials from the municipal bodies, veterinary departments, and food safety authorities to participate in the proceedings on May 8.

Officials have been tasked with exploring suitable relocation sites and coordinating efforts to address the complex issues surrounding dairy operations in Delhi.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

The neural circuitry underlying the responses of mouse mothers to calls from their pups has now been studied by researchers. The results were published in Nature. This mechanism may be important for sustaining mouse maternal care over time, the authors suggest.

The hormone oxytocin is known to be important for maternal physiology and behaviour; for example, it has roles in childbirth and in milk ejection during nursing. In humans, baby cries are a powerful signal of infant distress, and most nursing mothers respond to cries with oxytocin release, increased hypothalamic activity, comforting behaviours towards the infant and occasional milk ejection. However, the neural circuitry that routes auditory information about infant distress calls to oxytocin neurons is unclear.

To investigate the neural circuitry for maternal oxytocin release induced by infant cries, Robert Froemke from the New York University School of Medicine, New York, and colleagues recorded the neural activity of oxytocin neurons in maternal mice whilst their pups were calling. They found that these neurons responded via input from a region of the brain called the posterior intralaminar thalamus. This circuit was found to control oxytocin release and pup retrieval, providing a mechanism for the integration of sensory cues from the offspring into maternal hormone networks to promote efficient parenting.

“We found that oxytocin neurons responded to pup vocalizations, but not to pure tones, through input from the posterior intralaminar thalamus, and that repetitive thalamic stimulation induced lasting disinhibition of oxytocin neurons,” they write.

The findings help us to understand how sensory cues from offspring are processed by neural circuits to activate the release of neuromodulators such as oxytocin, which alter maternal behaviour.