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Prelim Bits 02-10-2018

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October 02, 2018

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

 

 

 

 

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