Facts in News

                            Facts In News

Baikal-GVD

• Russian scientists have deployed Baikal-GVD, a giant underwater space telescope in Lake Baikal.
• It will search for neutrinos, which are nearly massless subatomic particles with no electrical charge.
  • Neutrinos are the smallest particles currently known.
  • Neutrinos are everywhere, but they interact so weakly with the forces around hence, are hard to detect.
• Clear freshwater and thick, protective ice cover make Lake Baikal an ideal place to search for neutrinos.
• Lake Baikal
  • Situated in south-east Siberia, the 3.15-million-ha lake is the oldest (25 million years) and deepest (1,700 m) lake in the world.
  • It contains 20% of the world’s total unfrozen freshwater reserve.
  • Known as the ‘Galapagos of Russia‘, its age and isolation have produced one of the world’s richest and most unusual freshwater faunas.
    • It is home to approximately 1,700 to 1,800 endemic plant and animal species
  • In 1996, it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

                         (Image Courtesy: Britannica)

Inflation Targeting

• It is a central banking policy that revolves around adjusting monetary policy to achieve a specified annual rate of inflation.
• Its principle is based on the belief that long-term economic growth is best achieved by maintaining price stability, which is achieved by controlling inflation.

                                         (Image Courtesy: ET)

• Inflation
  • It refers to the rise in the prices of most goods and services of daily or common use, such as food, clothing, housing etc.
  • It measures the average price change in a basket of commodities and services over time.
    • The opposite and rare fall in the price index of this basket of items is called ‘deflation’.
  • It is indicative of the decrease in the purchasing power of a unit of a country’s currency.
  • This is measured in percentage.

Vaccine Wastage

• It is an expected component of any large vaccination drive.
  • Vaccines are procured with an estimated wastage, which has to be within recommended limits.
  • The Prime Minister of India raised concerns on vaccine wastage emerging from the Covid-19 inoculation drive.
• High vaccine wastage inflates vaccine demand and increases vaccine procurement and supply chain costs.
• It is directly linked to vaccine usage, which is the proportion of vaccines administered against vaccines issued to a vaccination site.
• Wastage Multiple Factor (WMF) is calculated from the formula “WMF = 100/(100 – wastage)”.
• Two categories
  • Wastage in Unopened Vials: Occurs if expiry date has been reached; if vaccine is exposed to heat; if vaccine has been frozen; breakage; missing inventory and theft and while discarding unused vials.
  • Wastage in Opened Vials: Occurs while discarding remaining doses; not being able to draw the number of doses in a vial; submergence of opened vials in water; suspected contamination and poor vaccine administration practices.
• Wastage occurs at three levels: During transportation, during cold chain point and at a vaccination site, both at service and delivery levels.

Diatom Test

• Diagnosis of death by drowning is deemed as a difficult task in forensic pathology.
• A number of tests have been developed to confirm the cause of such deaths with the diatom test emerging as one of the most important tests.
•  The test entails findings if there are diatoms in the body being tested.
  • Diatoms are photosynthesizing algae that are found in almost every aquatic environment including fresh and marine waters, soils, in fact, almost anywhere moist.

Science behind the diatom test

• A body recovered from a water body does not necessarily imply that the death was due to drowning.
• If the person is alive when he enters the water, the diatoms will enter the lungs when the person inhales water while drowning.
• These diatoms then get carried to various parts of the body, including the brain, kidneys, lungs and bone marrow by blood circulation.
• If a person is dead when is thrown in the water, then there is no circulation and there is no transport of diatom cells to various organs.
• Diatom analysis is considered positive only when the number of diatoms recovered from the body is more than a minimal established limit.
• Forensic experts also correlate the diatoms extracted from the body and the samples obtained from the water body where the drowning took place to ascertain the place of drowning. “
• The result of a diatom test will be different if a person is thrown in the water after he is dead.

Reliability

• It is reliable unless and until the deceased person has been drinking water from the same source of water before his death.
• For example, a person is drinking water from a well, then the diatoms from the well will be found in the body and so if he has drowned in the same well, then the diatom test will not be reliable.
• Also, the test will be negative if the person died instantly after falling into the water.
• The diatom test need not be done if classical signs of drowning — like froth at mouth and nostrils, cadaveric spasm, presence of water from drowning medium is seen in stomach and oedema of lungs — are present.

Covovax

• The Serum Institute of India (SII) hopes to launch Covovax.
• This is SII’s version of NVX-CoV2373, the protein-based Covid-19 vaccine developed by Novavax, headquartered in the USA.
• In August 2020, the two companies announced an agreement under which Novavax had given SII the licence to manufacture and supply the vaccine in low- and middle-income countries as well as India.
• The agreement is expected to support the supply of a minimum of 1 billion doses of this vaccine in these regions.

How does it work?

• Like several other Covid-19 vaccines, Covovax targets the spike protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus — the protein that allows the virus to penetrate the human cell.

Efficiency

• The vaccine recently showed an efficacy of 96.4% against mild to severe disease caused by the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 from ongoing late-stage global trials.
• Against mutant variants of the virus, it showed the efficacy of around 86.3% (UK variant) and only 55.4% among HIV-negative participants in its trial in South Africa.

SAAMAR Campaign

• The Jharkhand government announced the launch of the SAAMAR (Strategic Action for Alleviation of Malnutrition and Anemia Reduction) campaign to tackle malnutrition in the state.
• The campaign aims to identify anaemic women and malnourished children and converge various departments to effectively deal with the problem in a state where malnutrition has been a major problem.
• The campaign also tries to target Primarily Vulnerable Tribal Groups.

• It has been launched with a 1000 days target, under which annual surveys will be conducted to track the progress.