Frustration again for India at NSG meet
Group says all aspects considered; New Delhi will have a chance to make another attempt in five months
•The annual plenary meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in the Swiss capital of Berne on June 22 and 23 ended without agreeing on India’s case for a membership, for a second year, though member states agreed to convene another meeting on the subject of non-signatories to the Non Proliferation Treaty, such as India and Pakistan, in another five months.
•A public statement issued on Friday night by the 48-member body, which holds all consultations in secret and takes decisions by consensus, said: “The NSG had discussions on the issue of ‘Technical, Legal and Political Aspects of the Participation of non-NPT States in the NSG’. The Group decided to continue its discussion and noted the intention of the Chair to organise an informal meeting in November.”
•The announcement of the November date denoted “progress”, an Indian official said on Saturday, while the NSG also noted India’s special relationship with the group owing to the nuclear waiver India won in 2008 to conduct nuclear business. The NSG said the Berne plenary had “continued to consider all aspects of the implementation of the 2008 Statement on Civil Nuclear Cooperation with India and discussed the NSG relationship with India”.
•The “technical, legal and political aspects” phrase in the NSG statement is part of a process decided on in 2016, when India and Pakistan had both formally applied for membership to build criteria for admitting non-NPT members.
•India would prefer to see a “case-by-case” basis membership process employed, given it has an impeccable record on nuclear transparency compared to Pakistan, which is accused of nuclear smuggling.
•At the end of the plenary session in 2016, the NSG chairperson had appointed Argentine diplomat Rafael Grossi to oversee the process of building a consensus on the issue, but it is unclear if he will continue to lead that effort this year.
China blamed
•India has blamed China for being the “one country” stopping the NSG from a consensus, and although other members are understood to have expressed their concerns on a non-inclusive process, China has been prominent in objecting publicly, leading most experts to conclude the process won’t be resolved quickly.
•“[The NSG issue] is now part of the growing list of intractables with China, and there is not enough to permit a give and take,” said the former Prime Minister’s nuclear envoy, Rakesh Sood, when asked whether the stand-off would continue.
•The continuing strain in India-China relations has dimmed prospects of any consensus coming quickly, given that other countries are wary of intervening on India’s behalf, said others.
•“The U.S. and western countries are not prepared to confront China on this issue at this time. The U.S. needs China to help deal with the Korean nuclear programme and Indian NSG membership is not a current priority. So [membership] is likely to be a long haul but we should insist that it remains on the NSG agenda,” said former Foreign Secretary and Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board Shyam Saran.
•Notwithstanding reported attempts by New Delhi to ask Washington and Moscow to do more of the “heavy lifting” for India, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with the Chinese President at the SCO summit in Astana on June 9, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs repeated on Friday that there was “no change to China’s position”, on the admission of non-Non Proliferation Treaty states.
•Apart from China, non-proliferation hardliners inside the NSG remain ambiguous on the issue, an NSG official conceded, further clouding India’s path.
Nagaland Minister wants Khaplang faction on board
The group has been banned for attacks on security forces
•Nagaland Home Minister Yanthungo Patton said he would request the Centre to sign a ceasefire agreement with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Khaplang (NSCN-K), banned by the Home Ministry for attacks against security forces.
•NSCN-K patriarch S.S. Khaplang died earlier this month in Myanmar and it was under him that the outfit unilaterally abrogated ceasefire in March 2015, leading to multiple violent incidents, including the attack on an Army convoy on June 4 in Manipur’s Chandel district where 18 Army men were killed.
•Mr. Patton told The Hindu on phone that they (Nagaland government) contacted Mr. Khaplang in the “last part of 2015” to convince him to come for talks.
•“We contacted the NSCN-K earlier also, around one-and-a-half-years back, but the agreement could not get through. We were in touch with Khaplang, but since he is no more, we need to start afresh. We are in touch with the new leadership in Myanmar,” said Mr. Patton.
•The ruling Nagaland People’s Front (NPF) party in the State is an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
•The government signed a framework agreement with another Naga group, the NSCN-Isak-Muivah (NSCN-IM) in August 2015 to look for a solution to the decades-old Naga insurgency.
‘They are with us’
•Asked whether the proposal would impact the Centre’s agreement with the NSCN-IM, Mr. Patton said, “They are with us. The NSCN-IM also wants all Naga factions together and they would welcome the move once the NSCN-K joins the peace talks.”
•The NSCN-K operates from camps in neighbouring Myanmar and India has on several occasions asked the Myanmar government to take action against the insurgent groups there.
•“We understand that the Centre has banned them for five years. In the past also, we have shared our desire to initiate dialogue with the NSCN-K but after Mr. Khaplang’s death, we would re-initiate the process with Home Minister Rajnath Singh,” he said.
•Mr. Khaplang (77), a Hemi Naga from Myanmar, formed his own outfit in 1988 after he fell out with Isak Chisi Swu and Thuingaleng Muivah, the other two Naga leaders who went on to form the NSCN-IM. NIA had declared a reward of ₹5 lakh for his arrest. Mr. Swu died of illness last year in Delhi.
•Naga outfits envisage a “Greater Nagalim” or a contiguous land for the Nagas covering the States of Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur and Myanmar.
•On June 12, Mr. Rajnath Singh constituted a panel to examine various methods to curb the misuse of free movement along the Myanmar border and said that “it was being misused by militants and trans-border criminals who occasionally entered India, committed crimes and escaped to their relatively safer hideouts”.
•India and Myanmar share an unfenced border of 1,643 km adjoining Arunachal Pradesh (520 km), Nagaland (215 km), Manipur (398 km) and Mizoram (510 km) and permit a ‘free movement’ regime up to 16 km across the border. Mr. Patton said he had opposed the move by the Centre to curb movement of people along the Myanmar border as it would impact the local ethos and culture of the Naga community.
Us versus them: the burden of association
Human ‘difference’ is not the same as ‘superiority’ — difference assumes human equivalence
•The gist of my last column, aimed particularly but not exclusively at religious Muslims, was this: ‘To think that you are so special (as to inherit earth or heaven) can very easily turn into a dismissal of the equivalent humanity of others, as casteist Hindus do with Dalits and as colonial Europeans did with the colonised at times.’
•I knew that some would disagree. But what surprised me was the tendency to simplify the argument. When that tendency was displayed in some cerebral circles too — for instance, an Indian editor-novelist tweeted that my article basically blamed religious Muslims for militancy — I wondered whether I had been too cryptic in my writing, for surely such readers are capable of a nuanced understanding. My point was not that religious Muslims (or Hindus or Christians) are to blame; it was that unequal ‘us-them’ binarisms create a situation in which the equivalent humanity of others can be ignored, or erased. Not all religious people, but religious people with such binarisms — which can be avoided without losing faith — need to think again. This applies to some Muslims just as much as it applies to some Zionists, etc.
Superiority complex
•Or let us take the intense hatred that many white supremacists felt and feel for Barack Obama, the former President of the U.S. Much of this has to do with the colour of Obama’s skin — in short, racism.
•What is racism in this context? Racism is a belief that one’s race is superior to other races, and that it needs to be privileged in any case. It does not matter that the construct of ‘race’ can be shown to be flimsy and irrelevant. It does not matter that, at most, ‘race’ is a taxonomic category, not a biological or cultural one. It does not matter that the genetic variance within any particular ‘race’ — for instance, ‘Caucasoid’ — is greater than the mean genetic variance between individuals of different ‘races.’ And, of course, it does not matter that the main features of racial differentiation, such as skin colour, account for almost nothing of our common genetic inheritance.
•All this does not matter to the white supremacist in the U.S.: he is still convinced that he is superior to ‘blacks’ and ‘coloureds’, including Obama, a man of distinguished thinking, much erudition and remarkable capacity for hard work.
•One can argue that a vague feeling of white superiority exists among many white Americans and Europeans. Most of them, being decent people, do not act on it. But its existence enables the more angry or brutal or confused white person to take a gun and shoot down coloured people. One cannot totally absolve those who believe in some ‘soft’ rendition of white superiority from a share in the guilt of the white terrorist who shoots down coloured people.
•American evangelicals have a similar version of Christian superiority, rooted in their history of the creation of U.S. as a ‘new Jerusalem’. Most of them do not go about shooting non-Christians. Most of them would be shocked if you accused them of the intention, though some probably because they (erroneously, I hope) believe that the U.S. Army is there to do so.
•But every once in a while, some disturbed American (brought up on the myth of Christian superiority) turns his gun on a Muslim — or, unable to distinguish, a Sikh or Hindu — in the U.S. Who can reasonably claim that the most peace-loving of American evangelists who shares this belief in the superiority of his Christian faith does not also share a part of the blame?
Mistreatment of the ‘other’
•In my last column, I had already written about how some casteist Hindus maltreat Dalits because some caste Hindus believe themselves to be born superior. I had also written about how the supposedly ‘civilised’ or even ‘rational’ values of European colonisers led to feelings of cultural (and racial) superiority, which often enabled the massacre or maltreatment of non-Europeans. Do I even need to repeat these matters? Are they not evident enough to anyone who is willing to pause and reason?
•If that is so, what is so different about the unfortunately common religious Muslim position that only Muslims — actually, only Muslims of a certain observance — will go to heaven? Doesn’t it posit an ‘us-them’ category which can drive the more disturbed among our youth to justify (or commit) violence against ‘them’, in the same way as white superiority, militant Christian evangelism, casteist superiority, and colonial ‘civilisational’ hubris do?
•Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, was both a Christian fundamentalist and a white nationalist. He was also, as the media highlighted, a ‘lone wolf’. So was the perpetrator of the van attack on a London mosque last week. But that, to my mind, does not reduce the complicity of peaceful Christian evangelicals or ‘decent’ white nationalists, who believe that they are a superior or ‘chosen’ people, in sustaining the conditions and rationale for the eruption of a ‘lone wolf’. I do not see what makes a similar culpability vanish in the case of all those decent, peaceful religious Muslims who feel that they are a chosen people, intended for special privileges here or in the hereafter.
•The fact remains that human ‘difference’ is not the same as ‘superiority’. Difference assumes human equivalence. Once superiority of any sort, revealed or natural, is assumed, what one gets isn’t difference but its eventual eradication.
An antidote to joblessness
GST, Aadhaar, and the cow are part of a strategy
•Last Sunday was Father’s Day. As a dutiful son, I wanted to call my father and wish him but could not get through.
•On most days it is impossible to get him on the phone. Not because he hates cell phones but because he likes them rather too much. He owns four handsets, all with double SIM. He has anywhere between four to eight numbers, which he uses the way hockey teams use rolling substitution.
•At any given moment, only one number would be active. The other numbers would either be switched off or out of coverage area. The first eight contacts on my phone are my father – Appa1, Appa2, Appa New, Appa Old, Appa Latest, Appa Chennai, Appa Delhi, and Appa Enough.
•The other day I had forgotten my phone at the Kerala Store and when I went back to get it, the man at the counter — one of those middle-aged Malayalee gents who think they are very witty — asked me how many fathers I have. But of late, my father has been strangely unavailable even when we accidentally find ourselves at opposite ends of the same phone call. Generally it’s me who first starts saying ‘okay, bye’. But yesterday, he was the one in a hurry to hang up.
“What are you up to?” I asked him. “Suddenly so busy?”
•“It’s GST,” he said. “I’m helping some people.”
“WHAT!”
•I was shocked. “Are you telling me you’ve started doing GST work for other people when you still haven’t finished linking my PAN to Aadhaar and my Aadhaar to bank account?” I had also tasked him with extracting the PF money due from my ex-ex-ex-employer, which too was pending.
•Before you accuse me of exploiting my father in his old age, let me assure you that this is a purely symbiotic arrangement. All through my student years, it was my father who managed all the paperwork — from application forms to admission forms, examination forms, bank challans, and assorted certificates.
•You could say I am lucky to be blessed with a father who finds meaning in the pursuit of multiple, self-attested photocopies. It is because he finds joy in filing returns, booking tatkal tickets, and berating purposefully idiotic call centre executives that even as an adult, I have outsourced all banking, ticketing, bill payment, and tax-related work to him.
Maximum red tape
•Now, thanks to our government’s mantra of maximum government, maximum red tape, his post-retirement days are more adventurous than my pre-retirement ones. While I return exhausted after a day spent staring at a screen, he befriends bank managers, offers marriage counselling to RTO clerks, and comes home with a bagful of stories. To top it all, he loves queues, where he gets to strike up conversations with woebegone strangers. I had to quickly import him from Chennai to Delhi to help us survive demonetisation.
•“Don’t shout-da,” he said. “Do you know some poor fellows have to file three returns a month and 37 returns a year to be GST-compliant?”
•“You must be so happy,” I said. “Isn’t this what you always wanted? Forms to fill, documents to collect, and all the time in the world to figure out who is exempted from what rule according to which sub-section under what conditions.”
•“You know how it is with start-ups,” he said. “I don’t have all the time in the world.” “Start-up? What start-up?”
•He then told me, a bit sheepishly, that he, along with twenty other retired men, had founded a start-up that offered GST and Aadhaar-related consultancy services. Apparently, it’s a thriving business that is set to skyrocket after July 1. They had also secured Series G funding to start a GST Law School that would offer an MBA in Paperwork Management.
•Only then did it dawn on me: things like GST, Aadhaar, and cow were all part of our government’s brilliant strategy to eliminate joblessness. The plan is to generate so much paperwork that not only the employed but even the unemployed, including people who (to borrow my father’s phraseology) have one leg in the grave, are kept fully occupied. All the same, I was annoyed that he was de-prioritising his own son’s paperwork.
•“When will you...” I began, but he cut me off, asking me to hold, as one of his other phones rang.
•I could hear him clearly. “File GSTR-4 on the quarterly return for compounding the taxable goods by the 18th of the month succeeding the preceding quarter.”
“Can I...”
•“No, no, Mr. Singaravelu, which rascal told you to fill GSTR-8? Stick to GSTR-3, with the monthly return on the basis of outward supplies and inward supplies along with the tax on your revenue at 18% by the 20th of the following month.”
•“Appa, belated Happy Father’s Day!” I yelled, but I don’t think he heard.
Cinnamon helps address metabolic disorders
A range of health benefits reported in a Delhi-based study
•A spice commonly used in Indian kitchens may have health benefits, a new study has indicated. The results have been published in the June 2017 issue of the journal, Lipids in Health and Disease .
•A clinical trial conducted in New Delhi has found that the consumption of cinnamon ( dalchini ) powder helps address obesity and symptoms of metabolic disorder. The study, done at the Fortis Diabetes Obesity and Cholesterol Foundation, involved 116 men and women having conditions such as abdominal obesity, impaired glucose tolerance, high triglycerides and hypertension.
What it does
•After consuming three grams of cinnamon powder per day for 16 weeks, the average weight reduced was from 89 to 85 kg in the cinnamon group, while it was from 82 from 81 kg in the control group which was not given cinnamon. Along with dietary intervention, they were all prescribed brisk walking for 45 minutes every day. Patients were monitored two times a week. Researchers said consuming cinnamon along with dietary changes and physical exercise decreased fasting blood glucose, glycosylated haemoglobin, waist circumference, and body mass index. It also improved waist-hip ratio, blood pressure, serum total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, serum triglycerides, and beneficial high-density lipoprotein cholesterol.
•“Cinnamon is a spice which is commonly used in Indian cooking and hence can be easily incorporated in our daily dietaries, which will balance out metabolism better,” says Dr. Seema Puri, associate professor at the Institute of Home Economics, who contributed to the study.
Earlier studies
•A few previous studies have shown that cinnamon improves insulin sensitivity, reduces blood glucose levels and glycosylated haemoglobin, cholesterol, and blood antioxidant levels. But these were done with a few patients.
•Doctors suggest that the possible mode of action of cinnamon may involve inhibiting activity of enzymes involved in carbohydrate metabolism, stimulating cellular glucose uptake, and enhancing insulin sensitivity. “The study is scientifically well planned, but I have some reservations as the study groups were not matching at baseline. It is a major issue in double-blind-placebo-controlled studies and it raises doubts over successful implementation of plan,” says Dr. Rajesh Khadgawat, from the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS), New Delhi, who is not connected with the study.
•Dr. Anoop Mishra, one of the authors of the study, agrees that “there are baseline differences in the average weight between the two groups” but says “we have adjusted the analysis for that and found significant differences in outcomes that are valid”. — India Science Wire
Who really needs to be gluten-free?
Despite the current focus on gluten, there are probably many with celiac disease who don’t know they have it
•The gluten-free craze is unlikely to go away any time soon. Many people say they feel better after adopting a diet free of gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, even though relatively few gluten avoiders have been given diagnoses of celiac disease, an autoimmune condition that can attack the intestines and other tissues when gluten is consumed.
•Approximately one person in 140 is known to have celiac disease, which can remain silent for decades and become apparent at any age.
•“That’s an unbelievable number of Americans who may be affected,” says Dr. Joseph A. Murray of the Mayo Clinic, an international expert on the disease.
•While the health consequences of celiac disease have been well documented, other reasons a person’s health might be improved by avoiding gluten include a sensitivity to gluten or something else in wheat (the major source of gluten in Western diets) and the placebo effect — a genuine benefit inspired by the belief that a chosen remedy actually works.
•Gluten sensitivity does not cause the intestinal and other organ damage wrought by celiac disease, although people with it tend to experience an array of symptoms.
Possible symptoms
•Despite the current focus on gluten, there are probably many people walking around with celiac disease who don’t know they have it. The disorder can induce a host of vague and often confusing symptoms, the true cause of which may not be determined for a decade or longer. Among possible symptoms: abdominal pain, bloating, gas, chronic diarrhoea, or constipation; chronic fatigue, anaemia, unexplained weight loss, or muscle cramps; missed periods, infertility or recurrent miscarriage; vitamin deficiencies, discoloured tooth enamel, bone loss and fractures. Some people assume that the way they feel is normal and never mention their distress to a doctor, or if they do, doctors may dismiss the complaints as “nothing to worry about” or attribute them to another cause.
•The fact is, however, that celiac disease can remain silent for many years, during which time hidden damage can occur with lifelong, sometimes irreversible, health effects. And as a report for the United States Preventive Services Task Force that reviewed the evidence recently stated, many of these “adverse health consequences” are “potentially avoidable.”
•These factors suggest that a screening programme to detect hidden disease might be health-saving for millions of people, especially children whose growth can be impaired and who may suffer other long-term problems from undiagnosed and untreated celiac disease.
•However, after a thorough review of published reports, the task force did not endorse a screening programme, saying there is still not enough evidence to answer “key questions related to benefits and harms of screening for celiac disease in asymptomatic individuals”.
Self-treatment and caution
•Meanwhile, millions of Americans are self-treating with gluten-free diets. This has its advantages and disadvantages.
•A main disadvantage of self-treatment without a diagnosis is that an accurate result of the tests for celiac disease requires that the person regularly consumes gluten. Avoiding this protein would mask a positive finding on a screening blood test and biopsy evidence of damage to the intestines that can result from eating gluten.
•“There’s a simple blood test for celiac, but it must be done before you change your diet,” Dr. Murray says in an interview.
•Aside from intestinal damage, failing to detect asymptomatic celiac at an early age can result in poor bone development and suppressed growth, he says. This can create “a high risk for fractures both before and after a diagnosis of celiac, which might not happen until age 40 or 50,” he explains.
•When undiagnosed celiac results in persistent fatigue or infertility, “you can lose years of quality of life that you can’t get back,” Dr. Murray says.
•If symptoms are subtle, he adds, “people can be sick for so long, they don’t know what health is. They don’t recognise their symptoms and don’t complain to the doctor. If the whole population were screened and people with celiac were found and treated, it could result in no health consequences.”
•That, however, would require rigorous adherence to a gluten-free diet. Without a medical diagnosis of celiac and an explanation of its possible consequences, people are likely to be less careful about what they eat.
•There is also a potential medical downside to diagnosis and treatment. “Contrary to what many people think, a gluten-free diet is not necessarily a healthy diet,” Dr. Murray says. “When people with celiac go on it, they often gain weight, especially fat weight, because they are no longer malabsorbing nutrients. They are also more likely to develop metabolic syndrome,” which raises the risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
Ordinance to amend SEZ Act likely
•The government is likely to bring in an ordinance by next week to amend the SEZ Act to bring it in line with the Goods and Services Tax (GST), due on July 1. The Commerce Ministry is working on the same, a source said.
•Certain provisions in the special economic zone (SEZ) Act, 2005, are not consistent with the GST regime and need to be made compatible before the July 1 rollout date.
•For instance, the duty drawback norms, under which an exporter is compensated for duties during the course of production of goods, are required to be in sync with the new indirect tax structure. Under the current rules, SEZ units get a service tax exemption and the developers are exempted from customs or excise duty for development of zones for authorised operations.
On conception and contraception: The story of Saheli
The challenge of developing an effective birth control pill was thrown open by the Indian government in the 1960s
•Birth control, or deciding whether to have a baby, is at once a personal decision and a societal one. The woman must have a say in this, since it will affect her health, welfare, freedom of choice and way of life. A huge population increase will affect the resources of the society. Individual freedom and societal concerns are at the two ends of the spectrum, just as conception and contraception are. While the decision to have a baby should be left by and large to the woman, population control has become a national policy since a burgeoning population drains the food supply, standard of living, economic and social growth.
•Through the ages, several methods have been adopted for contraception. Many devices - implants, female and male condoms and surgical sterilisation of males and females - have been used. But the safest (and least intrusive) is the use of chemical molecules, or “pills” in common parlance, which interfere with the biological steps involved in pregnancy. While it had been known that certain steroid molecules play a role in inhibiting crucial steps in the process, it was in 1951 when the organic chemist Carl Djerassi, along with his co-workers George Rosenkrantz and Luis Miramontes, came out with an inexpensive synthesis of the molecule called norethindrone, that the first birth control “pill” was born. This, in retrospect, was a revolutionary step that has helped many millions of women make personal decisions about having a baby or not.In the female, what this pill does is to inhibit ovulation or the release of the egg. In addition it also tends to make the vaginal fluid thicker and more viscous. As a result the
sperm from the male is unable to meet the egg and fertilize it. An important point about using the pill is that it must be taken daily. Quitting it for even 2 weeks could lead to pregnancy upon mating. In addition, in many women, daily intake also leads to vomiting, nausea and bleeding between periods, since the steroid component in the pill can lead to some more unpleasant complications in some women. There was thus room for better pills.
The successful Indian effort
•The Indian government, in the 1960s, called upon Indian laboratories to come up with alternate birth control pills. And Dr. Nitya Anand and his team at the Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow, rose up to this challenge and worked on it. Analysing earlier publications of relevance, they found a lead in a molecule called ethamoxytriphetol (alias MER-25) which showed, among other properties, anti-fertility effect in animals. But it was discontinued due to its low potency and some undesirable nervous system side-effects.
•Organic chemists are molecular sculptors and architects. Nitya Anand and his colleagues, starting with MER-25 as the base, synthesised a variety of molecules and tried each of them for anti-fertility activity. After several attempts, they hit upon the right candidate in 1971. Its chemical structure is shown in the accompanying figure. Since it belongs to the chroman family and was made at the Central Drug Research Institute, they christened it Centchroman.
•In contrast to the Djerassi pill, the Lucknow pill has several distinct features and advantages. 1. It need not be taken daily. Since it stays well absorbed in the body for over 170 hours, a weekly dose suffices. 2. It does not affect ovulation (and thus not disturb any hormonal balance) but .prevents implantation, the key step in pregnancy. 3. It can be taken even after sexual intercourse, thus useful even in cases of rape. 4. Since it has no steroidal component, the associated side-effects are absent. 5. Upon discontinuing the drug, fertility can be regained, thus making it suitable for spacing children.
•After the obligatory clinical trials, first on animals and then on women, Centchroman was approved by Indian authorities in 1990 and licensed for manufacture by Hindustan Latex Life Care, and by Torrent Pharma, with the name Saheli (girl friend). Saheli is now part of the National Family Planning Programme as an oral contraceptive pill. And WHO has approved and assigned it the technical name ormeloxifene, which is now sold the world over as Novex-DS, or Sevista
One drug, many effects
•Often, one notices that a given drug has benefits against more than one illness. This is true of ormeloxifene too. It is effective not only against conception, but also has anticancer action (against breast, ovarian and head and neck cancer) and against bone desorption (osteoporosis). Saheli is a friend which guards against several problems!
•To end with a human note about two great men: Carl Djerassi and his mother fled their native Austria, evading the Nazis extermination of Jews, and landed in New York in 1939, where their last $20 was swindled. Djerassi rose from this penniless youth to remarkable heights as a creative chemist and an excellent writer. And Nitya Anand, studying in Bombay in 1947, persuaded a plane to fly to his native Lyallpur (now in Pakistan), had the seats removed and packed his parents and their neighbours in it, and had it flown to India, saving them from the savage Partition riots. Several of us owe the swift rise in our early careers to his throwing open his laboratory facilities and professional advice. The Saheli man has been a true Sahayak.
NASA’s CHESS to study interstellar clouds
•NASA is launching a sounding rocket CHESS on June 27 to study vast interstellar clouds and know about the earliest stages of star formation. The Colorado High-resolution Echelle Stellar Spectrograph will measure light filtering through the interstellar medium, which provides crucial information for understanding the lifecycle of stars.
•In the space between distant stars there drift vast clouds of neutral atoms and molecules, as well as charged plasma particles that may, over millions of years, evolve into new stars and even planets.
•CHESS will train its eye at Beta Scorpii — a hot, brightly shining star in the Scorpius constellation well-positioned for the instrument to probe the material between the star and our own solar system.
•This is the third flight for the CHESS payload in the past three years, and the most detailed survey yet.
Threadworm infection can lead to active TB
Samples had reduced levels of TB antibodies
•A new study reveals that worm infection might be one of the major risk factors for individuals with latent tuberculosis infection to develop the active disease.
•The study was carried out in individuals with latent TB co-infected with intestinal worms (Strongyloides stercoralis). Commonly called the threadworm and found largely in tropical and subtropical countries, it affects about 50 to 100 million people worldwide.
•Three groups of 44 individuals each were selected for the study. Individuals in the first group had latent TB and worm co-infection, those in the second had latent TB but no worm infection and the third set had only worm infection.
•The blood samples of the patients with latent TB and worm co-infection showed decreased levels of human TB antibodies (IgG and IgM) compared with those of people with latent TB. Also, there was a decrease in B cells (a type of white blood immunity cells, guardian cells) and their activating factors. The diminished levels of the TB antibodies could potentially have detrimental effects on immune response to TB.
De-worming treatment
•The patients with worms were administered anti-parasitic tablets — Ivermectin and Albendazole.
•Six months later, their blood and stool samples were collected and studied.
•The results showed that post treatment, there was a significant increase in the levels of TB antibodies. The B cell numbers and their responses significantly increased following treatment. The results were recently published in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases.
•The exact cause of antibody increase is not yet fully understood; but the study was able to provide an evidence of a significant association of worm infection with modulation of B cell function. “Treatment with a single dose of anti-worm tablets could be used prior to new TB vaccine trials, as the response will be much better,” says Dr. Subash Babu of National Institute of Research in Tuberculosis (NIRT), Chennai, and senior author of the paper.
•The individuals with latent TB and worm co-infection are more susceptible to active TB, as their immunity is reduced. “We are planning to conduct further studies to understand the pathway by which the worms alter these antibodies and the immune responses,” says Dr. R. Anuradha, Post-doctoral fellow at National Institute of Research in TB, Chennai, and first author of the paper. This study also suggests a better treatment path to be used in countries endemic to both TB and worm infection.
