Current Affairs for IAS Exams - 16 August 2013

What went wrong with India’s TB control

• Tuberculosis is very much in the news, but for all the wrong reasons — a shortage of drugs; increasing multi-drug and extensive drug resistance (MDR, XDR), making treatment both cumbersome and expensive; total drug resistance (TDR) as a veritable death warrant; popularly used serological tests for diagnosis being declared worse than useless, and a government order for mandatory case notification.

• Private practitioners are legally authorised to treat TB, but without quality check mechanisms. They often bypass the prescribed treatment protocol, while MDR, XDR and TDR result from non-protocol drug treatment.
• India pioneered TB control among developing nations.
• A national TB control project was launched in 1962.
• With BCG vaccination as the main intervention, there was an air of expectancy that it would protect

• In 2012, India’s golden jubilee year of TB control, the World Health Organization (WHO) named India the worst performer among developing nations, with 17 per cent of the global population carrying 26 per cent of the global TB burden.

BCG vaccination

• India’s TB control pioneers P.V. Benjamin and Frimodt-Moller introduced the mass BCG vaccination in the hope that it would protect against infection by TB bacilli
• BCG manufacturing began in Chennai and an extensive vaccine trial was launched in Chengalpattu district, Tamil Nadu, to measure its protective efficacy.
• In 1978, the Expanded Programme on Immunisation took over BCG vaccination.
• In 1979, preliminary results of a 15-year-long BCG trial showed no protection against infection by TB bacilli.
• In 2000, the Indian Academy of Pediatrics called for a major redesign of TB control, with alternative tactics to prevent infection and treat infection before it caused disease.
• WHO’s 2012 Annual Report on TB confirmed India’s failure. DOTS saves lives from TB mortality, but has failed to control TB.

Infection in the air

• TB bacilli spread through the air we breathe in; everyone is at risk of infection.
• After infection, the majority remains well, but the bacilli stay alive, latent or dormant in body tissues for life.
• Some 10 per cent will develop TB disease some time in adult life. When disease pathology is in the lungs (pulmonary TB), the bacilli have an easy escape route to the environment. Thus, lung TB is the critical link in the chain of transmission — coughing and spitting allow the bacilli to contaminate the

New company bill

• The country will finally have a contemporary legislation to regulate the corporate sector.
• The existing Companies Act dates back to 1956, since when the corporate landscape has dramatically changed. While the new Companies Act takes into account the present environment by overhauling several provisions of the existing Act, such as, for example, the one pertaining to auditor appointments, a lot will depend on the subordinate rules under the different provisions that will framed by the executive.
• The new law stipulates that companies above a certain size have to spend two per cent of their average net profit of the last three years on CSR.

• This is the first time that CSR has been mandated by law in any country in the world and that the government means business is evident from the fact that the company’s board has to create a committee to oversee CSR activities and the company’s policy in this regard has to be posted on its website.

• The board is also answerable if it fails to spend the mandated sum on CSR in a particular year.

How the avian brain evolved

• It has been the belief of many palaentologists so far that Archaeopterix Lithographica , the first flying dinosaur, had a brain size that was intermediate between that of non-avian dinosaurs and modern birds.
• a new study by Ms. Amy Balanoff and her team indicates that the brain size of A. Lithographica was smaller than that of many earlier dinosaur species.

• Ms. Balanoff is Instructor of Research Anatomical Sciences, Department of Anatomical Sciences, Stony Brook University School of Medicine, Stony Brook, New York, U.S. The study is published in a recent issue of the journal Nature .

• Brain size is an important determinant of the ability to fly and the greater the relative brain size (relative to body mass) the greater the neurological capabilities required of flight. Birds are distinct in this aspect as their brains, particularly fore brains, are expanded relative to body size.

• The expansion by volume of the avian endocranium (the space inside the skull housing the brain) began early in theropod (carnivorous dinosaur) evolution and recent studies unlike previous ones suggest that avialans, the family to which A. Lithographica belongs, are not unique in their brain-readiness for flying. In fact many earlier dinosaurs had larger endocranial space than A. Lithographica .

• This fact was borne out of the study which involved Computed tomography analyses of fossil skulls of the phylogeny of dinosaurs including modern birds. Previous studies have established that A. Lithographica was not the basal bird. Is this finding of brain size further proof that A. Lithographica is not a basal bird? “

HIV and neurocognitive disorders

• The human immunodefiency virus (HIV) while weakening and compromising the body’s immunity, is also believed to trigger HIV-associated dementia (HAD) by infecting the central nervous system.
• This in turn could lead to complex neurological and behavioural problems as a result of neuro-inflammatory manifestations in the brain due to infection.
• In a study conducted by scientists from the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), the role of a particular protein — HIV-1 TAT protein — was examined.
• It was found that the extra cellular secretions of this protein modulated the expression of a key gene involved in immune response.
• This happened through microRNA which plays a vital role in gene regulation.
• At CCMB, the scientists have cloned and expressed a recombinant HIV-1 TAT protein and exposed it to human microglial cell lines.
• Microglial cells are the resident macrophages in the central nervous system.

• They found that microRNA-32 in the cells exposed to the protein was highly expressed compared with the controls. Through the enhanced activity, microRNA-32 targeted an adaptor protein (TRAF-3). The adapter protein plays an important role in immune signalling pathways.

Sources: Various News Papers