📰 Operation Muskan launched in Odisha to rescue missing children
Odisha launches drive to rescue missing children
•Operation Muskan, a month-long drive to rescue Odisha’s missing children, was launched by the State police on Saturday. This is the third edition launched by the Crime Branch in association with the Women and Child Development Department. On the first day, as many as six children were rescued. A joint team of the Crime Branch and Commissionerate of Police rescued the children, who were working as child labourers. At least 981 children were rescued during the drive in 2015 and 2,610 in 2016.IANS
📰 did Modi stay away from Palestine
Why was the Israel visit historic?
•When Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Israel this month, it was hailed as the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister there since the creation of Israel and India’s independence in 1947. It was also notable as he became the first senior Indian leader not to visit Palestinian areas or meet with Palestinian officials during the visit, or even mention Palestine publicly, overturning the primacy their cause has received from India over the past seven decades. In the only official reference to the conflict, the joint statement issued during Mr. Modi’s visit merely referred to the “Israel-Palestinian peace process,” not speaking of the two-state solution that India officially supports.
Why drop the trip to Palestine?
•For the Israeli side, the visit from the Indian Prime Minister was in itself a major diplomatic victory as India was one of the first countries to recognise the state of Palestine in 1988. Given India’s consistent support to the recognition of Palestine, Mr. Modi’s visit signified even more than the visit of a close ally, like the U.S., and its importance was underscored in the way Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped all plans for the three days Mr. Modi was in Israel. The significance of dropping Palestine from the visit wasn’t lost on the Israeli media either, which pointed out that even U.S. President Trump had visited Palestinian territory during his visit in May. When asked, Indian officials said the Prime Minister’s decision came from a desire to “de-hyphenate” relations with Israel and Palestine.
What will be the fallout?
•India has many areas of cooperation with Israel, which could grow much further if India drops its “political baggage” of the past, even if that involves losing some leverage on the Palestinian side. For their part, Palestinian officials have been muted, with President Mahmoud Abbas’s diplomatic adviser Majdi Elkhaldi saying they hope the visit wouldn’t come “at the expense” of the relations with Palestine.
What is the message?
•The Modi government is not unaware of what the shift could mean, and in a carefully coordinated campaign that began in 2015, the Prime Minister set out to woo all the countries in the region that could have looked askance at India’s shift away from traditional support to Palestine, including Iran, Israel’s chief rival. In May this year, he invited Mr. Abbas and gave him a warm welcome in New Delhi. Finally, the government chose dates for the Israel visit when the Palestinian leadership could definitely not host Mr. Modi, given that Mr. Abbas would be away on foreign visits. Many foreign policy analysts also see Mr. Modi’s visit as the ending of India’s ‘non-aligned movement (NAM)’ stance that the NDA government has made a decided shift from, underlined by his decision not to attend the NAM summit in Venezuela last year.
•The decision to drop Palestine from his itinerary may have historical underpinnings for the BJP-led government as well, as the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) has long proposed closer links between Israel and India. Hindu Mahasabha president Veer Savarkar broke with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru by supporting the right of “Jews to their homeland” in Israel, as did the then RSS chief Golwalkar.
What are the ties now?
•In modern times, and especially since India established full diplomatic ties with Israel in 1992, the links between the two countries have run a steadily increasing course of engagement, and Israel is now one of India’s top most defence suppliers, while India is Israel’s tenth biggest trading partner. What’s more, while most Indians would baulk at comparisons between Kashmir and Palestine, they see a role for cooperation in counter-terrorism, something Israeli forces are acclaimed for, while young Indian students increasingly seek ties with Israel on technology, start-ups and innovations. It is for all these reasons and more that Mr. Modi and the government decided to forge India’s relationship with Israel in exclusion of its previous position on the centrality of the Palestinian question.
📰 No humour please, we are Indian
Politicians need to remember this: in cities, towns and villages, people are making fun of them, and it is their right
•Here we go again. One argument made by the apologists of the current regime in New Delhi is that those who criticise the Prime Minister, the RSS-BJP and the Sangh Parivar are elitists out of touch with the mainstream of Indian society. There is nothing wrong, say the chaddi chamcha s, with a ‘robust Hindu self-affirmation’, with the much-awaited reawakening of a sense of pride in the majority religion and an assumed ‘Hindu nation’.
•One of the many problems with this formulation is that it cherry-picks what is included and excluded in the definition of ‘mainstream’. So, the fact that a majority of Indians are now non-vegetarian is not mainstream, but a supposed ‘social sanction’ against the eating of beef is deemed to be so.
•The fact that the reality for a majority of Indians is the struggle for a decent livelihood, proper food, shelter and health care is not mainstream, but the idea of a burgeoning superpower spending obscene amounts of its annual budget on armaments is to be accepted without question. In the same category of self-serving hypocrisy falls this business of prosecuting and hounding people who are deemed to have ‘insulted’ such and such political leader or institution or national symbol.
Right to be irreverent
•Down the ages, the one weapon the poor and downtrodden have always had is their ribald irreverence for the powers that be. Whether in poetry or song, whether in dance, folk theatre or traditional procession, this is manifested in so many different Indian languages and cultures; the raja , the nawab , the daroga , the mullah , the pandit , the jotedar , the collector, and more recently the MLA or MP have always been the butt of extremely sharp jokes, spoofs and caricatures. This is the mainstream Indian culture that the prissy, prudish, power-greedy middle and upper classes find so disgusting and threatening. Clearly this irreverence is to be denied and punished as the powers that be develop an ever thinner skin, an ever more insecure idea of their own pomp and supposedly unassailable importance.
•All India Bakchod (AIB) and other spoof-makers and stand-up comics may take a lot from the Western notions of television comedy and satire but they are also part of the very Indian tradition of making fun of the rich and powerful. The brouhaha around their recent post where they pasted elements of a dog’s face on to Narendra Modi’s face is worth examining.
•The Modi dog face wasn’t even particularly witty or funny, it was childish, like a student drawing a moustache or horns on a photograph of some teacher or historical figure. A far funnier example of this kind of thing was when someone put a Mohawk wig on the bald pate of Winston Churchill’s statue in Whitehall — there was supposedly ‘the greatest Briton ever’ suddenly transformed into a racist street thug or at least into a punk rocker. Mr. Modi himself is an absurd enough figure, one who gives us rich opportunities for laughter and derision, so one wonders why the normally quite funny bunch at AIB couldn’t come up with anything better.
•Next, the outrage and the police FIR, etc. are in themselves outrageous: the people protesting on Shri Modi’s behalf love it when the opponents of the regime are ridiculed on the Web in the worst, most obscene terms; and the police surely have better things to do than chase someone who’s made a jejune photo-joke.
Inadvertent publicity
•Then there is the question as to why AIB deleted their post. Their answer was, we always play cat and mouse with the powerful, we make little forays into satire and pull back when we think it strategically wise, that’s how we roll and will continue to roll. Their defence was, we spend a lot of money on court cases, we have several FIRs against us, so, thank you but shut up, we know best how to defend our work, how to survive to fight another day.
•In any case, the post with the two photographs including the dog-face has now gone viral. Despite them deleting it, the police have decided to act, so the fun and games may only just be starting. Guardians of the law across the country and under all sorts of different political parties all need to be given workshops on freedom of speech.
•One of the things they need to understand is this: the first deal any public figures make in a democracy is that in return for their public stature and visibility, they can be questioned, ridiculed and caricatured. If they go against this unwritten deal, then they do not believe in the tenets of democracy. Simple.
•Even as the cops prosecute the AIB crew, even as their top lawyers defend them, what the politicians of this country need to remember is this: in the small towns and villages, in the backstreets of the cities, around the tea stalls and paan shops, millions of people are making fun of them right now, and laughing and cursing them in the most extreme, bitter and bitterly funny terms. That is mainstream India and it is not going away anytime soon.
📰 Freedom’s echoes, Laila’s story
Rereading ‘Sunlight on a Broken Column’ ahead of the Independence Day
•Every year as August 15 approaches — and this year it does as the 70th anniversary of Independence and Partition — it comes as a summons to update ourselves on the ever-growing, and ever more nuanced, body of work on how freedom came to India, and in the form that it did. In this exercise, Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column is a classic that keeps giving, with each reread giving you a different crevice in the sprawling saga to embed yourself in.
A vanishing world
•The novel was first published in 1961, and it is many things. It is perhaps foremost a coming-of-age novel as Laila, the bookish orphan in a taluqdari family of Lucknow, chronicles the world around her, as the purdah-ed household of her grandfather gives way to the Westernised world of her aunt and uncle, as she moves from a rather physically circumscribed existence to a bracing exposure to the social, political and intellectual winds sweeping across the country, as she watches her family try to reconcile their feudal order with the democratic ideals of the freedom struggle they have individually committed to in varying degrees.
•It is a novel about breaking social barriers to win love, and about finding the big heart to survive grief and the toll Partition extracts. Eventually her two dashing cousins opt for different countries, Saleem for Pakistan and Kemal for India. Kemal earnestly calculates his brother’s share “to the last pot and pan and stool and chair” to be handed over as “evacuee” property to the Custodian, with the line drawn between the two new countries being superimposed on the family estate. When he tries to convince his mother to sell their share of the Lucknow residence to be able to buy what’s Saleem’s share in the ancestral home, she speaks less of the property and more of a mother’s pain and incomprehension at the sudden finality of the split in a shared geography as she cries, “Is this a war with Custodians for enemy property? Did they not consent to the partition themselves? Why treat those people like enemies who went over? Were they not given a free choice?”
•It seemed it had been just the other day when she walked in on Saleem talking of his college-days’ enchantment with Marxism, “Mind you, I can still appreciate its principles, but I am no Lenin and can establish no Soviets…” She had frowned, “Linen serviettes? I do not know what you are talking about.” Saleem had laughed, “How fortunate you are, mother. Oh, brave new world!” How swiftly that innocence vanished.
•Equally, if this is a world of extraordinary privilege, Laila mindfully tracks its class, gender and agrarian inequities, and Sunlight… is a valuable work of social history too. Yet Laila is not just the watchful centre of the novel — she is its beating heart. She is making her way in the world on her terms, always searching, heeding her elders’ sensitivities while staring down snobbish society ladies who sniff at her cotton sari while scouting around for appropriate brides for their sons. The college-time discussions, with Congress and Muslim League supporters, with nationalist thought taking on the colonial argument, are as reflective of Laila’s intellectual spine as of the larger discussions raging nationally about India’s future.
•It will be Laila’s task to tie up the loose ends in the narrative of the Lucknow household, those of her family as well as those who work there, and place the aftermath against the “arguments and untested ideals” of her youth.
•Progressive, inclusive
•It is easy to read Attia Hosain’s backstory in the novel. Her father was a taluqdar, growing up she read compulsively, and, as her daughter Shama Habibullah points out in the foreword to a recent collection of Hosain’s work ( Distant Travellers ), she was the first woman from a taluqdari family to graduate from Lucknow University. Habibullah also quotes from the 1936 manifesto of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, with which Hosain was associated: “It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress in the country by introducing scientific rationalism in literature. They should undertake to develop an attitude of literary criticism that will discourage the general reactionary and revivalist tendencies on questions like family, religion, sex, war and society. They should combat literary trends reflecting communalism, racial antagonism and exploitation of man by man.”
📰 Mobilising a health revolution
On how the mHealth application strengthens TB detection and referrals
•With a rapidly expanding mobile user base and the availability of affordable data packages, mobile technology, it is clear, has come to stay in the health-care segment. Health-care professionals, who do harness technology, have continued to do so simply because of the enormous benefits they confer, not only to the process and delivery of health care itself but also for patients and their relatives.
•From using mobile phones to facilitate retinal scans and even test one’s blood pressure — with or without accessories, from remote locations beamed on to the high-resolution screens in tertiary care centres — to using mobile phone cameras to videograph surgeries, using the mobile phone for health behaviour change communication, and the humble not-so-smart phone to merely text in vital public health information used by literally the last link in the public health pyramid, mHealth has come to stay.
Aiding the TB fight
•More recently, researchers have tried to use mHealth as a battering ram in the hope of overcoming what is acknowledged as an intractable area of public health in India — tuberculosis case referrals. In India, statistics show that tuberculosis remains a major public health problem accounting for 23% of the global TB burden, and worse still, has a truculent hurdle in terms of reportage of cases. S. Chandha, A. Trivedi and K. Sagili of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease and S.B. Nagaraja say that mHealth technology has been highly effective in trying to address these concerns and increased both public and private health-care provider accountability to patients.
•Despite efforts by the Revised National TB Control Programme (RNTCP), India has up to a third of the estimated three million TB cases that remain unnotified worldwide, they record in a paper in the June edition of Public Health Action .
A project in Jharkhand
•A mobile health (mHealth) technology-based application was developed to help rural health-care providers (RHCPs) identify and refer presumptive TB patients to the nearest microscopy centre for sputum examination using mobile applications on their smartphones. The project was implemented in the tribal population of Khunti district, Jharkhand.
•Thirty of 171 rural health-care providers were trained to use an application to identify and refer patients with symptoms of TB. Of the 194 TB cases diagnosed, those using the app contributed 127 cases. The RHCPs installed the patient information management app, ‘ComCare’, on their phones. Any person believed to show symptoms of TB is usually referred to a microscopy centre, but seldom is there follow-up with the patient.
•In addition to connecting the RHCP and labs virtually, the app was also configured to send a reminder to the patient if he or she failed to visit the microscopy centre within seven days of referral, besides providing counselling messages to the patient.
•As a result, in addition to enhancing the number of referrals, it also reduced the time taken for diagnosis and treatment initiation. RHCPs using the technology referred nearly nine times more presumptive TB cases than other RHCPs. Diagnosis and treatment initiation via the app were eight to nine times more rapid than when it was not used, leading the authors to suggest that innovative mHealth use has the potential for replication across the country, specifically to fast-track the progress made in TB case detection and treatment.
📰 A setback for public health?
•A recent judgment in a vaccine compensation case in Europe has set alarm bells ringing globally. The case involved a French national, known as “J.W” in court documents, who had developed multiple sclerosis (MS) a year after he had been vaccinated against hepatitis B in 1998.
•J.W had been vaccinated with the hepatitis B vaccine between the end of 1998 and mid-1999. According to the court documents, in August 1999, J.W developed symptoms of MS, an autoimmune disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues. In 2006, he sued pharmaceutical company Sanofi Pasteur, which had made the vaccine, claiming that it had caused the illness. He died in 2011.
•Given a lack of scientific consensus over the safety profile of the vaccine, the European Union (EU) court has allowed circumstantial evidence to determine the cause. The judgment has got the global public health community worried as it may set a precedent for similar cases.
Why vaccines are crucial
•Vaccines are among the most effective public health interventions that save an estimated 2.5 million lives each year. However, they can have side effects, including serious ones, in a small proportion of people. Most of these are minor, from mild fever, headache or soreness which resolve quickly. The benefits far outweigh the risks.
•The use of the hepatitis B vaccine for example, highlighted in the EU case, has led to a significant decrease in disease levels in many countries. Within 10 years of its introduction, the U.S. reported an 80% fall in the incidence of all acute hepatitis B infections; Taiwan recorded a 50% drop in liver cancers among children. Several studies have also investigated the link between the vaccine and multiple sclerosis. While some experts are sceptical, a majority believe the vaccine to be safe. The lack of consensus does not indicate a lack of safety. All reported side effects of vaccines need to be evaluated scientifically.
•Besides, the onset of disease after vaccination is not sufficient to attribute the cause. Most countries have now established effective vaccine pharmacovigilance programmes. India’s adverse events following immunization (AEFI) surveillance programme, for example, has recorded a nearly 90% success rate in assessing AEFI cases using global protocols set by the World Health Organisation (WHO). It has helped India to win similar legal battles against pentavalent vaccine use in 2013, following AEFIs.
•Rapid investigations were carried out and the vaccine got a clean chit from the country’s highest scientific body, the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI), which was accepted by the Indian court. This helped the country to continue using the life-saving vaccine, protecting children against childhood killers such as bacterial meningitis and pneumonia.
For the larger good
•Public health interventions must be guided by such scientific panels, weighing the pros and cons for the larger public good. Therefore, the EU court verdict is worrying. Although it may not be generalised, it may still sow the seeds of doubt about proven vaccines and potentially put millions of lives at risk. Hesitancy over vaccine use could cause a rise in vaccine-preventable diseases and lead to outbreaks of deadly infections such as diphtheria and whooping cough. Measles outbreaks have been reported recently in Europe and previously in the U.K. following rumours of a vaccine-autism link. The need of the hour is to ensure effective surveillance, compensation for those affected and to promote public confidence in vaccines, without which we would be foregoing the most remarkable health advances so far.
📰 ‘Merger will give us the reach of a bank’
‘Our speciality lies in using synergies among businesses to enhance value,’ says the group’s patriarch
• Even as Chennai-based Shriram group is gearing up for a bigger play in the Indian corporate world with its proposal to merge with IDFC Bank, its founder R. Thyagarajan (known as RT, to many) gets candid on many issues in this free-wheeling interview. Excerpts
Why did you embark on this merger?
• We are very good in deposit mobilisation. But we don’t have the reach of a bank. So, we are not able to give a whole range of products which a bank is able to provide. Even with all these constraints, we were able to create a deposit base of Rs. 15,000 - 20,000 crore.
All your financial services firms are doing well. Why do you wish to fix something that’s not broken?
We are not fixing anything. Why did we start general insurance business with Sanlam?
•We were doing an excellent job of servicing both our depositors and truck operators. Where was the need to get involved with the general insurance? Our truck operators today have an advantage because we were delivering general insurance products to them. As against a one to one-and-a-half year wait for getting their claims settled, today they get them settled in 40 days.
•That means an enhancement of the claim amount by 30%-40% since he gets it earlier. He borrows money at 24%, and now saves interest on that.
•Claims processing costs him five to six thousand rupees. We have eliminated all that.
•We make a profit by doing insurance with them. He gains enormously by dealing with us rather than with some others.
Could you have done it without Sanlam?
•We could have done it with anybody. It is designed for the Indian market. The services are designed for truck operators. Sanlam did not have much of a role except appreciate and motivate.
Is that what you expect from IDFC?
•Rajiv Lall and others in IDFC are banking specialists. They know more about banking and RBI regulations. We [Shriram] are participating in banking. We are not going to run a bank. We will bring our experience and perceptions of what the markets and our customers want.
Were you not opposed to converting your NBFC into banking?
•I was never opposed to doing anything. I always said that it would not be possible for us to conform to the RBI norms and start a bank. We are not opposed to getting into any business for that matter.
•How did we get into general and life insurance when we had no background? Only I had the experience, and not the whole team. We did not take people from the general insurance industry at all.
Your not being a bank - does it affect your business?
•Our customers will get more advantages by our being in banking. If we are not in banking, our customers will be benefiting less. If we are in banking, our customer will put his money in a savings account. He may go for a credit card. All these facilities we can offer to him. These we can’t do today. He will be the beneficiary. Since he is a beneficiary, incidentally, we will also benefit. If you look at general and life insurance, it is more and more accepted by the trucking community. Today, we have over 20,000 customers from the trucker community. People have realised the advantage of going in for life insurance. We don’t force them to go in for life insurance.
Popular perception is that ‘Shriram is RT and RT is Shriram’. What will happen now?
•In India, there are 20 lakh truck operators. I would say only 100 people know RT. The rest don’t know me. Similarly for depositors. About 90 to 95% of them won’t know who RT is. Today, I don’t have a single share of the Shriram group companies.
Bank of Madura lost its identity on merging with ICICI Bank. Will Shriram too experience this?
•IDFC Bank is a very young organisation. It does not have a legacy. It has not developed a rigid culture. Shriram group has a culture. So, it is very likely that this Shriram culture will influence the growth and development of IDFC. They don’t come with a pre-conceived notion as to how to run a bank. And, they don’t have a set of people with a culture which directs how it will go in the future. Shriram has, however. So, Shriram’s influence will be there. It is not that Shriram people will be running it.
Why is it then called IDFC-Shriram and not the other way round?
•Alphabetically, I comes before S. It is a merger and not a takeover of one by the other. Therefore, we are equals. We treat each other with the respect each commands.
How critical is a banking licence to you?
•It is not as if we were dying to be a bank. We always felt that our customers will benefit more with a banking instrument. We are looking at what is good for our customers. He can now do many things ... may do money transfer ... he can do that easily now. What more we can do with banking as an instrument? In this, we will be guided by IDFC.
IDFC has just over two years’ experience as a bank. Why do you want to ally with them?
•For one, you don’t have baggage while creating an organisation together. The disadvantage is that there is not too much of an expertise and experience.
•How do we take advantage of the strengths and keep the weaknesses away? That is what we should bring together. The way we are working with Ajay Piramal, Sanlam and earlier with Telco and Ashok Leyland ... in all our partnerships ... there were certain advantages and disadvantages. Ashok Leyland put two of their important directors on our board. They were actively involved. Tatas put two of their men on our board because they put 15% equity. We are used to partnering with organisations.
•We have been successful in building on the strength they brought in and avoiding their weaknesses. We have successfully managed it in four partnerships before.
Will the chit business remain independent?
•The chit business is outside all these. It remains independent, owned by Shriram Trust.
•Bharat Re was promoted by Shriram Capital to strengthen our general insurance business.
•Having achieved that to some extent, we are taking it out of Shriram Capital. It will not have more than 15% capital in it.
•It will not be a part of the Shriram group any more. The next phase of growth for Bharat Re is an independent ownership
📰 Gender differences in stress response
The study has implications for the manner in which clinical trials must be carried out
•That male and female mice respond differently to stress has once again been highlighted by a study carried out by scientists from Hyderabad’s Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT) and Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CSIR-CCMB).
•While female mice were more vulnerable to chronic mild stress compared with male mice, those females with ovaries removed exhibited similar vulnerability as the males. This study was recently published in Neuroscience.
•Eight to ten-week-old mice were separated into eight sets of which four were control groups and four were given stress and studied. Fourteen types of stressors were used for the study. Two different stressors were given each day for 21 days. Each of the stressed mice was kept in a separate cage thus socially isolated for the entire chronic mild stress period. After 21 days, various behavioural assays were conducted to assess the anxiety and depression levels of the mice.
•The animals were sacrificed on the third day after completion of the stress conditions, and their brain proteins were studied for the expression of stress-related proteins. The females showed a significant increase in the stress protein when compared to males and ovary-removed mice.
Variation between sexes
•“Most clinical trials are carried out on male mice and the effect on females is neglected. We wanted to show that both sexes respond differently to stress conditions and drugs,” explains Dr. Sumana Chakravarty, Principal Scientist, CSIR-IICT, and corresponding author of the paper.
•Females with ovaries removed resembled males in their behaviour — they exhibited less ability to feel pleasure. The results also showed that there was an increase in body weight in the control groups but not in the stress groups. The stress condition also impaired the locomotive ability of the mice.
•“Antidepressant drugs show various side-effects in females and children. Some antidepressants that had been tried and tested in adults were found to cause suicidal tendency when used by children. So it is essential to also study the dosage before administration,” says Dr. Arvind Kumar, Principal Scientist, CSIR-CCMB and co-author of the paper.
•In order to evaluate the effect of ovarian hormones on stress, the female mice without ovaries were injected ovarian hormones for 21 days along with stress conditions. One group was injected with 17Beta-Estradiol and another was given progesterone every four days, beginning on day three till the end of experiment. Interestingly, estradiol administration was able to significantly reduce total immobility and also increase the sucrose solution consumption showing inclination to sense pleasure. It also significantly increased the anti-stress protein levels. Noteworthy effect was not seen in mice that received progesterone.
•The findings strengthen the evidence that estradiol administration reduces stress-induced, depression-like behaviours. “Future studies are required to investigate the effect of stress during the various stages of the reproductive cycle to get a better understanding of ovarian hormones in stress. A study of the effect of different doses of estradiol is also essential for better conclusions,” said Dr. Bhanu Chandra Karisetty, from CSIR-IICT,the first author.
•According to Pranav Joshi, CSIR-IICT, a co-author of the paper, specific estrogen targets need to be identified for better drug development to treat females.
📰 Emerging infectious diseases, One Health and India
‘One Health’ promotes the realisation that the health of humans, animals and the environment are linked to each other
•In a landmark study in 2008, Kate Jones and colleagues at the Zoological Society of London analysed emerging infectious disease (EID) events across the globe between 1940 and 2004. They showed these to be non-randomly distributed, dominated by zoonoses (diseases which can be transmitted from animals to humans) from wildlife and dependent upon socioeconomic and environmental factors.
•While a majority of the 1,500 pathogens known to infect humans came from animals and an estimated 320,000 viruses can infect mammals, it is unclear which of these can jump from animals into humans and cause disease? Are we at a greater risk from apes, which share our genes, or rodents, which share our habitats? Two recent studies have addressed this.
•Olival and collaborators writing recently in the journal Nature, analysed associations between 754 mammals and 586 viruses to understand what determines viral richness, diversity and zoonotic potential. Bats were found to harbour the highest numbers of zoonotic viruses and are also a major reservoir for coronaviruses. These include the SARS virus that emerged in China in 2002, spread to 27 countries and killed 774 people and the MERS coronavirus that caused 640 deaths.
•Anthony and others studied coronavirus diversity in thousands of bats, rodents and monkeys from 20 countries in Central Africa, Latin America and Asia, previously identified as zoonoses ‘hotspots’. Nearly 10% of bats had coronaviruses, the diversity being highest in locations with multiple bat species, such as the Amazon rainforest. India also has an incredibly diverse bat population with 117 species and 100 sub-species, but we know little about the viruses in Indian bats and their disease potential.
Pathogen hotspot
•The Indian subcontinent is a ‘hotspot’ for zoonotic, drug-resistant and vector-borne pathogens. But we know little about the key threats. Poor domestic research and lack of international collaborations in this area, the latter driven by restrictive policies on sharing clinical and research materials, are responsible.
•Prof. Ian Lipkin at Columbia University, an expert on novel pathogens, has tried to work with India for many years. “Sample access is challenging,” he says. “I'm eager to help [provided] the logistics can be sorted. Let’s focus on technology transfer in emerging infectious diseases. Global public health and the people of India deserve our best efforts.”
•The transmission of infectious disease requires contact, the probability increasing with population density. With 1.34 billion people, 512 million livestock and 729 million poultry, the density and rates of human–animal, animal–animal and human–human contacts are high. These increase the potential for the emergence, circulation and sustenance of new pathogens. India has also lost about 14,000 sq km of forests over 30 years. Deforestation brings wildlife into direct contact with humans and domesticated animals, increasing the risk of zoonoses. It also alters weather patterns, indirectly and unpredictably affecting zoonoses.
Missed opportunity
•India presents a poor picture of One Health. There are 460 medical colleges and 46 veterinary colleges in India, but most do little or no research. The governance structure and inter-sectorial coordination is also problematic, with human, animal and environmental health controlled by different ministries, with little cross-talk. India’s National Health Policy approved recently is also a missed opportunity. It fails to even mention “zoonoses” and “emerging infectious diseases,” let alone break the silos or enable work in key EID areas.
•However, as seen during the 2006 Bird Flu outbreak, various sectors in India are capable of working together. The need is to move from being reactive to proactively understanding zoonotic pathogens before they cause human disease. This will require preparedness and policy inputs. An inter-ministerial task force should prepare a policy framework that enables preparedness by strengthening inter-sectorial research on zoonoses and health systems. Such research makes economic and political sense.
•Discovering the entire viral diversity is estimated to cost $6.4 billion. The cost of the 2002 SARS outbreak is pegged at $54 billion and a severe flu pandemic could cost about $3 trillion or 5% of the world economy.
•Further, a new disease emerging in any part of the world is a global threat. If India aspires to be a world leader, it cannot afford to ignore its responsibility towards global health. If India can pledge and successfully implement nuclear non-proliferation, can it remain a potential threat for disease proliferation?
📰 New galaxy discovered
It is 1,000 times as bright as Milky Way
•Scientists have discovered a very distant galaxy, some 10 thousand million light years away, which is about 1,000 times brighter than the Milky Way. It is the brightest of the submillimetre galaxies, which have a very strong emission in the far infra red, researchers said. The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
•Scientists led by Anastasio Diaz-Sanches from Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) in Spain used gravitational lensing that acts as a sort of magnifier, changing the size and intensity of the apparent image of the original object.
•“Thanks to the gravitational lens produced by a cluster of galaxies between ourselves and the source, which acts as if it was a telescope, the galaxy appears 11 times bigger and brighter than it really is, and appears as several images on an arc centred on the densest part of the cluster, which is known as an Einstein Ring,” said Diaz-Sanchez.
•“The advantage of this kind of amplification is that it does not distort the spectral properties of the light, which can be studied for these very distant objects as if they were much nearer,” Diaz-Sanchez said.
•To find this galaxy, a search of the whole sky was carried out, combining the data bases of the satellites WISE and Planck in order to identify the brightest submillimetre galaxies.
•The galaxy is notable for having a high rate of star formation. It is forming stars at a rate of 1,000 solar masses per year, compared to the Milky Way which is forming stars at a rate of some twice a solar mass per year.
•“This type of object harbours the most powerful star forming regions known in the universe. The next step will be to study their molecular content,” said Susana Iglesias— Groth, an astrophysicist at Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) in Spain.
•The galaxy is so bright that its light is gravitationally amplified, this allowed scientists to look into its internal properties.
📰 Predatory journal clones of Current Science emerge
They approach authors in a predictable style
•An online predatory journal which is a clone of the journal Current Sciencepublished by the Indian Academy of Sciences and Current Science Association, Bengaluru, has sprung up and is soliciting manuscripts from gullible researchers. “This journal has not published any issues” is what one gets to read on clicking the ‘current issue’ button on the predatory journal website.
•A scroll in the original Current Science website warns readers of the predatory journal trying to dupe researchers. It says: “We have learned that an entity http://www.currentscience.org is operating from an IP address located in Turkey. It has copied content from the Current Science journal website and promotes itself as the publisher of Current Science .”
•Another clone of Current Science can be found at http://www.currentscience.co.in and is operating from an IP address located in Ukraine. The front page of the cloned predatory journal website is nearly identical to the original. Even the links to all the articles take the readers to the original content. Only discerning readers can spot the differences. The URL of the original Current Science website is http://www.currentscience.ac.in.
•“This is a typical predatory journal behaviour and is a fraud,” says the predatory journal alert put out by the publishers.
•The original journal website warns its readers saying: “Emails originating from currentsciencejournals@gmail.com are fraudulent. These emails are from a fake website that could include a request to submit articles and promise to publish approximately two weeks after the submission. If you receive such an email, forward the message to currsci@ias.ac.in and delete the message.”
•Besides publishing journals with fancy titles, there are several predatory journals that are clones of respected journals. The predatory version of Current Science is one such instance of a clone.
The give away
•“Prof. S. C. Lakhotia, Department of Zoology at the Banaras Hindu University received an email from the predatory journal (currentsciencejournals@gmail.com) on July 1, and he alerted Prof. R. Srinivasan, the Editor of Current Science, ” says G. Madhavan, Executive Secretary at the association.
•In an email sent to Prof Lakhotia, the predatory journal has invited him to contribute to the next issue of Current Science. Like all predatory journals, it lists out the impact factor, the acceptance rate of papers, which is 38%, and a promise to publish papers within two weeks of submission.
•The mail is signed by “Prof. R. Srinevasan, Editor-in-Chief.” It is only a discerning reader who will know that Current Science does not send out such emails and that the original journal has only an Editor and not an Editor-in-Chief, as mentioned in the email. Also, Prof. Srinivasan’s name is wrongly spelt in the email.
•“We are trying to get in touch with the Indian Computer Emergency Response team. Otherwise, there is little that we can do. So we are immediately informing people about the predatory journals,” says N.A. Prakash, formerly with the Indian Academy of Sciences.
