📰 UN report flags IS threat in Karnataka, Kerala
‘Significant number of terrorists present’
•A UN report on terrorism has warned that there are “significant numbers” of Islamic State (IS) terrorists in Kerala and Karnataka, noting that the Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) terror group, which reportedly has between 150 and 200 militants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, is planning attacks in the region.
•The 26th report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning the IS, the Al-Qaeda and associated individuals and entities said that the AQIS operates under the Taliban umbrella from the Nimruz, Helmand and Kandahar provinces of Afghanistan.
•The group reportedly has between 150 and 200 members from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar and Pakistan. The current leader of the AQIS is Osama Mahmood , who succeeded the late Asim Umar.
•The AQIS is reportedly planning retaliation operations in the region to avenge the death of its former leader, the report said.
•According to the report, one member state reported that the IS Indian affiliate (Hind Wilayah), which was announced on May 10, 2019, has between 180 and 200 members .
IS attacks
•The report added that there are significant numbers of IS operatives in Kerala and Karnataka.
•In May last year, the terror group (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) claimed to have established a new “province” in India, the first of this kind of announcement that came after clashes between militants and security forces in Kashmir.
•The dreaded outfit, through its Amaq News Agency, had said that the Arabic name of the new branch is “Wilayah of Hind” (India Province).
•A senior Jammu and Kashmir police officer had rejected the claim.
•Previously, the IS attacks in Kashmir were linked to its so-called Khorasan Province branch, which was set up in 2015 to cover “Afghanistan, Pakistan and nearby lands”.
With an aggressive China on one side and push from partners on the other, India faces tough choices on an Indo-Pacific maritime alliance
•Parallel exercises in the Indo-Pacific this week, including a trilateral exercise between the U.S., Australia and Japan in the Philippines Sea, and an Indo-U.S. naval exercise in the Indian Ocean have fuelled speculation that Quadrilateral (Quad) exercises will be launched soon between all four navies.
•All eyes are on a decision by New Delhi, to accept Australia’s request that has been pending for four years now, to join the annual Malabar exercises with India, the U.S. and Japan. The decision has not been an easy one, given China’s fierce opposition to the militarisation of a coalition seen as a counter to its claims in the Pacific and inroads in the Indian Ocean. India has also been wary of joining any exercise that could be construed as an alliance, something External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar said this week India will “never be” a part of.
•In 2018, at the Shangri-La Dialogue, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that India sees the Indo-Pacific as a “geographical concept”, not a “strategy or a club of limited members”. Also, India is the only country in the Quad that shares a land boundary with China, and the militarisation of the Quad will not help India deal with that threat. Fourthly, unlike the U.S., Japan and Australia, which are tied by military alliances, India is a member of other strategic forums, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with China, Russia and Central Asia, BRICS and RIC, which appear to be at cross purposes with a Quad alliance.
The China factor
•Even so, many contend that China’s recent moves, including its aggression in the South China Sea and transgressions and deadly clashes across the Line of Actual Control (LAC), may in fact prove to be the tipping point that makes India take the plunge, pushing the countries of the Quadrilateral Security Group, called the Quad for short, into a military embrace that will have far-reaching implications for regional and global security.
•Ironically, the Quad, which today involves such laboured and slow-paced discussions, was originally born in an instant: from the crisis that followed the tsunami in December 2004. Within days of the disaster, India had mobilised an impressive fleet, and demonstrated to the world that it would not just manage its own rescue effort in Tamil Nadu and the Andaman and Nicobar islands but could also provide assistance to its maritime neighbours: Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Indonesia.
•In all, about 32 Indian ships and 5,500 troops were pressed into India’s international efforts. The humanitarian and disaster relief effort was coordinated in the next few weeks with three other naval powers engaged in the rescue effort: the U.S., Australia and Japan. The then Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran, spoke every day to his counterparts about what was needed next. Eventually, the “Quad” effort was handed over to the UN, but the idea of the Indo-Pacific as a larger maritime strategic community, and the Quad as an effective instrument in it, had been planted in the minds of all four members.
•Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who had been promoting the idea of an “arc of prosperity and freedom” that brought the Quad countries closer together, was happy to develop the concept, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh discussed it with him during a summit in December 2006. In 2007, when the annual India-U.S. ‘Malabar’ exercises were held in the Indian and Pacific oceans, first off Okinawa and a few months later, off Visakhapatnam, they included Japan, Australia and Singapore. The exercises and the strategic coordination in what Mr. Abe had called “the confluence of two seas” rattled Beijing and Moscow, who termed it an attempt to build “an Asian NATO”.
•China’s Navy had not at the time undergone its massive modernisation drive towards a blue water navy (it only commissioned its first aircraft carrier, Liaoning , in 2012), and the effort by the Quad countries was clearly an impetus to hasten the process. But at the time, China’s demarches to the Quad countries paid off. Contrary to the currently popular lore, it was not India that cancelled the “Quad” exercises in 2008: the U.S., which was trying to gain China’s support in the six-party talks on North Korea, dampened enthusiasm for a Quad Foreign Ministers’ meeting, and the Kevin Rudd government in Australia then pulled out of the exercises. The Quad was shelved for the next decade.
•In 2017, the Quad returned, now named Quad 2.0, coinciding with the revision in Washington’s assessment of the challenge from China, and similar reassessments in New Delhi, Tokyo and Canberra. In November 2017, just months after the Doklam stand-off between the Indian Army and the PLA, officials from all four countries met in Manila for the ‘India-Australia-Japan-U.S.’ dialogue. The name of the new Quad was innocuous, in an effort to dispel the notion this was a “gang-up”, and they did not even issue a common joint statement. In fact, differences within the group went deeper, and while India defined the “Indo-Pacific” region from Africa and the U.S. west coast, the U.S. limited it to the Indian coast (in 2020, the U.S. aligned its definition with India’s).
Alternatives to BRI
•Subsequent meetings have closed many of the gaps they have, and the Quad grouping has met biannually since then, discussing “connectivity, sustainable development, counter-terrorism, non-proliferation and maritime and cyber security, with a view to promoting peace, stability and prosperity in an increasingly inter-connected Indo-Pacific region”. The emphasis on connectivity has seen the Quad challenge China in another sphere: a coordinated effort to provide financing and sustainable alternatives to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has led many nations to take loans and accept infrastructure bids from Beijing.
•The counter has not yet made much headway, but each of of the Quad countries is coordinating their responses on infrastructure projects in their spheres of influence, including India and Australian efforts in the Pacific islands, India-U.S. coordination in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region, and India-Japan joint efforts to develop projects in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar. The military aspect of the Quad has also grown: India has strengthened its naval ties with each of the other Quad countries, and there have been more interactions, formal and informal at the official, political and military levels.
•Eventually, the question over the next step in the Quad — whether India invites Australia to the next Malabar exercises or not — will be secondary to how India develops its own strategic vision, especially given the stand-off with China. Will India revert to traditional positions of non-alignment, enlisting China’s ally Russia in its attempt to manage the threat from Beijing? Or will India pursue “multi-alignment”, inviting middle powers such as the EU, the U.K., France, Russia, and partners such as Brazil, the UAE and South Africa into its Indo-Pacific strategy? Or does India’s course lie in a closer coalition with China’s adversaries, and being drawn into choosing its corner in the new Cold War that is developing between the U.S. and China? India’s moves with the Quad will be closely watched, as they bear more meaning than ever before on the path it will take to realise its strategic future.
📰 Is SARS-CoV-2 a latent virus which can recur?
Is there a possibility of a ‘second’ COVID-19 infection? Or are there flaws in the testing system?
•The story so far: Ever since cases of ‘reinfection’ — people who had tested negative for COVID-19 testing positive again after a while — emerged in early January, the question of latency of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is being hotly debated. The first such cases emerged in the east (China, South Korea) where scientists were puzzled over why or how individuals who had tested negative twice for the virus, had, after a few weeks or months, tested positive, the second time around albeit with milder symptoms. A latent infection is when the virus in the body is dormant and does not replicate within the host. It however possesses the capacity to be reactivated at some point, causing a flare-up of the disease much later.
What is a latent viral infection?
•A latent viral infection is an infection that is inactive or dormant, authors Sergey Sheleg and Alexey Vasilevsky write in an article in the Global Journal of Infectious Diseases and Clinical Research. “As opposed to active infections, where a virus is actively replicating and potentially causing symptoms, latent (or persistent; but not chronic) infections are essentially static which last the life of the host and occur when the primary infection is not cleared by the adaptive immune response,” they explain. Examples are Herpes simplex viruses type 1 and 2, varicella-zoster virus, HIV, Epstein-Barr virus (human herpesvirus 4), and cytomegalovirus. They are known to cause typical latent infections in humans, Sheleg and Vasilevsky add.
•They go on to explain that “latent viral infections can be reactivated into a lytic form (the replication of a viral genome). The ability to move back and forth from latent to lytic infections helps the virus spread from infected individuals to uninfected individuals”.
•Ryan McNamara, a research associate at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina, in a long tweet thread sought to explain the difference between the types of viral infections. Tweeting from @Ryan_Mac_Phd, he says: Viruses fall into two broad categories: chronic and acute; while a chronic virus will infect its host for extended periods of time, often through the lifetime of the host. An acute infecting virus, such as influenza and rotavirus, is cleared from the body after a few days or weeks.
•“A chronic virus can go into latency. This is when a virus is present within a cell, but not actively producing more infectious virus particles. For example, when a herpes virus infects a cell, its genome can remain in that cell as long as that cell is alive,” Dr. McNamara says.
•The reactivation to the lytic state, when the production of new virus particles occurs, he calls an ‘intentional strategy by the virus to promote its survival’. A perfect example of this would be chickenpox, caused by the human herpesvirus 3 — after infection, “the body responds and the virus goes into latency. Decades later, it can re-activate, resulting in shingles”. What causes reactivation is not very clear in this case. According to him, HIV can also go into latency after infection. It integrates itself into the host chromatin (a substance within the chromosome), and can reactivate upon stimulation such as inflammation induced by co-infecting pathogens. This can lead to uncontrolled HIV replication and clinical AIDS.
Does SARS-CoV-2 go into latency? What causes second infections?
•Sheleg and Vasilevsky have recorded South Korean officials reporting that nearly 100 people thought to be cured of the novel coronavirus have tested positive for COVID-19 again. According to Jeong Eun-Kyeong, director of the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the COVID-19 virus may have “reactivated” in the patients rather than them becoming re-infected.
•In Chennai too, last week, the civic body recorded a couple of cases of patients who had recovered from COVID-19 testing positive again after a span of time.
•Prof. T. Jacob John, an eminent Vellore-based virologist, says: “None of the observations conclusively proves a second infection. In each one of these cases, there is sufficient reason to suspect that it is one infection, with negative results in between. While the RT- PCR [reverse transcription/polymerase chain reaction] tests are considered to be the gold standard for testing, all tests are not 100% accurate. False positives and false negative results are expected to occur. Patients are known to test negative, then positive, and negative again, in subsequent tests performed even within days.”
•Dr. McNamara explains the concept of “limit of detection” of a virus, here. This is the threshold where a virus can be detected. A negative SARS-CoV-2 test does not mean zero infection; it means no detectable infection.”
•Prof. John clarifies that another issue is that many viruses can survive at the mucosal level in spite of immunity. “A classical example is the polio virus, which, like SARS-CoV-2, is also a positive sense, single strand RNA (ribonucleic acid). While immunity kicks in two weeks after infection, viral shedding can continue for up to 10 weeks, in spite of very high antibody levels. Why this happens has not been explained by anybody, so far. And, in polio, if a stool test came back negative in between and then tested positive, we don’t take it as a second infection, it is a continuous infection.” He further found with lab tests that the host harbours an “antibody-bound virus that is non-infective”.
•He goes on to add: “If second infections were sufficiently common we would have picked it up by now. But it is possible that some people have specific problems with immunity against this virus. In that case, it must be investigated further.”
•Dr. McNamara explains: “It’s entirely possible to have detectable, then non-detectable, and then detectable SARS-CoV-2 virus because of the limit of detection of our current testing. Also, a SARS-CoV-2 test doesn’t necessarily mean there is infectious virus. Testing for SARS-CoV-2 RNA on surfaces can yield a positive result, but that simply means that there is some SARS-CoV-2 RNA present, it doesn’t necessarily mean the RNA is intact, or that the RNA is inside an infectious particle. So, fragmented RNA can actually yield a positive result.”
•Korea Biomedical Review (koreabiomed.com) reported in April that the country’s Central Clinical Committee for Emerging Disease Control had said the reason 263 Koreans tested positive after recovery from the new coronavirus seemed to have been not because they contracted the virus again; rather, remaining virus fragments were detected in them.
Does testing criteria make a difference?
•Globally, it is now accepted that clinical signs are sufficient to commence treatment for COVID-19, even before an RT-PCR test is done. Also, cessation of symptoms is said to signal that a person has recovered. Unless someone has been critically ill, it is no longer necessary for the patient to test negative twice for COVID-19 to be declared cured, or sent home.
•“We do know that finding cases is now largely determined by testing in India. But the experience of other nations has shown that we could do the same with clinical diagnosis too, they did not suffer the consequences of that,” Prof. John adds.
•While 100% protection is not possible, he insists that ultimately, the use of masks and physical distance is going to be the only deterrence for transmission.
