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.
