pollution which is potent enough to cause a stroke he saidstroke has remained as the secondmost common cause of death across the world several studies and data by the world health organisation who suggest that every 2 seconds a case of stroke is reported and every 6th second a person dies from it across the globe in india it is among the top five causes of disease burden and has risen from the 12th position in 1990southeast asian countries including india and china are responsible for 70 of the total stroke burden in the world and 8085 stroke deaths occur in these countries low awareness of preventive measures lack of uniform treatment and lack of access to the treatment are a few key reasons of high incidence of stroke and mortality in these regionsthe experts also observed that general practitioners and people at large need to be educated to recognise stroke signals since immediate medical care is the only intervention that can save lives of such patients dr mv padma srivastava head of neurosciences centre at aiims said in a summit today that a massive awareness among the public to recognise the signals of stroke and quality training of physicians is needed at large to ensure medical care reaches the patients timelyevery minute lost after a stroke kills 19 million neurons in our brain and people must recognise the signs such as facial drooping arm weakness speech difficulties vision problem etc they must act fast facial drooping arm weakness speech difficulties and time to save life remember there is no brain transplant sometimes what people do not think to be a sign of stroke turns out to be one she saidin india we also need a stroke map and quality certification for stroke centres we cannot depend on neurologists alone we must train our physicians to manage less severe cases of stroke at local level instead of sending them to tertiary level hospitals srivastava added