Air Safety Oversight Score
- A report on "Air Safety Oversight Score" was recently released by International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
- It seeks to identify if countries have effectively and consistently implemented the critical elements of a safety-oversight system.
- India has slipped below its previous ranking of 66% to 57%.
- India is one of the 15 countries that are below the minimum target rates.
- India's score is lower than that of Myanmar, Bangladesh, Maldives, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and even North Korea in the Asia-Pacific region.
- The only countries that rank below India are small and little known such as Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu and Samoa.
- A downgrade would mean Indian airlines won’t be able to mount new flights to the US or form alliances with US airlines.
- This can stifle Indian carriers' plans of global expansion.
U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)
- USMCA is the recently concluded agreement among the countries to replace 25-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
- It gives the U.S greater access to the dairy markets of canada and mexico and allows extra imports of canada cars.
- Canada managed to preserve the dispute settlement mechanism as a protection for its wood industry.
- This deal covers more than $1 trillion trade.
- It is intended to last 18 years and will be reviewed every 6 years.
Commodity Derivatives
- The Bombay Stock Exchange became the first stock exchange in the country to launch commodity derivatives contract in gold and silver.
- Till date, commodity derivatives contracts are available only in the 2 specialsed commodity derivatives - Multi-Commodity Exchange (MCX) and National Commodity Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX).
- The launch of commodity derivatives platform on the BSE will help in efficient price discovery, reduce timeline and make it cost-effective.
- BSE also waived off transaction charges for the first year in the commodity derivatives segment.
- Derivatives - They are financial contracts that derive their value from an underlying asset.
- These could be stocks, indices, commodities, currencies, exchange rates, or the rate of interest.
- These financial instruments helps to make profits by betting on the future value of the underlying asset. This is why they are called ‘Derivatives’.
Nobel Prize for Medicine
- Two immunologists, James Allison of the U.S. and Tasuku Honjo of Japan, won the 2018 Nobel Medicine Prize.
- They won for their work on a new approach to cancer treatment.
- They figured out how to help the patient's own immune system tackle the cancer more quickly.
- It contradicts with traditional forms of cancer treatment that directly target cancer cells.
- The discovery led to treatments targeting proteins made by some immune system cells that act as a “brake” on the body’s natural defences killing cancer cells.
- T-cells are a type of white blood cell that play a central role in the body’s natural immunity to disease.
Polio
- Polio is a highly infectious disease caused by a virus.
- It invades the nervous system, and can cause total paralysis (Acute flaccid Paralysis) in a matter of hours.
- The virus is transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the faecal-oral route or, less frequently, by a common vehicle (for example, contaminated water or food).
- It mainly affects children under 5 years of age. Polio vaccine, given multiple times, can protect a child for life.
- There are three types of polio virus strains - P1, P2 and P3.
- P2 was eradicated globally in 1999. The last case due to type-2 wild poliovirus globally was reported from Aligarh in India in 1999.
- India reported its last polio case in 2011 and is also declared polio-free by WHO in 2014.
- India eliminated the type-2 strain in 2016, and the type-2 containing poliovirus vaccine (ToPV) was phased out in April 2016.
- Recently, Traces of polio type-2 virus were found in some batches of oral polio vaccine (OPV) manufactured by a Ghaziabad-based pharmaceutical company.
- Union health ministry has asked the polio surveillance team in Uttar Pradesh to trace all children who were given the vaccine.
Elimination and Eradication
- Elimination means stopping the transmission of a disease in a specific geographic area or country, but not worldwide.
- Disease eradication is the permanent reduction of a disease to zero cases through deliberate measures such as vaccines.
- Once a disease has been eradicated, intervention measures are no longer needed.
Source: The Hindu, Economic Times
