📰 TN files for contempt against Centre
Union government seeks three months' extension to frame scheme for sharing of Cauvery water
•Tamil Nadu on Saturday moved the Supreme Court to initiate contempt proceedings against the Union government for its “wilful disobedience” in not implementing the court’s February 16 judgment in the Cauvery dispute.
•In its petition, the State said the Centre had failed to frame a scheme within the time limit set by the court, by not setting up the Cauvery Management Board and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee to monitor the allocation of the river water among Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Kerala and Puducherry.
Election constraints
•The contempt petition has been filed at a time when the Centre has also moved the court for a three-month extension of time to implement the verdict. The Karnataka Assembly election is to be held on May 12.
•While seeking clarification on some aspects of the verdict, the Centre claimed that notifying the scheme during the election process would lead to “public outrage” and “cause law and order problems.” Tamil Nadu accused the Centre of refusing to act to “protect the interests of the farmers and the larger interests of the State.”
Six-week deadline
•The contempt petition wants the court to “purge the contempt forthwith” by directing the Centre to frame a scheme by providing for the Cauvery Management Board (CMB) and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee as per the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal’s order of 2007. As per the February 16 judgment in the appeals, the Centre had to frame the scheme in six weeks. The deadline ended on March 29.
📰 ‘Dilution of SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act cannot be allowed’
Forum seeks inclusion of the Act in Ninth Schedule of the Constitution
•Taking strong exception to a recent judgement of the Supreme Court that imposed several restrictions on filing of cases and arrest of persons under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, the National Coalition for Strengthening of SC / ST (PoA) Act has urged the Union government to take swift measures to overturn this “dilution of the Act.”
•At a press conferenceorganised here on Saturday by the coalition with the support of a number of political parties, Henri Tiphagne, a core group committee member and Executive Director of People’s Watch, said that the Union government must soon file a review petition in the case.
•“The Union government, represented by its Additional Solicitor General, failed to present a water-tight case to the two-judge bench of the Supreme Court, which partially led to this judgement. This should not happen in the review petition,” he said.
•Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi president Thol Thirumavalavan said that the Union government must also consider going for an appeal to a larger bench of the Supreme Court.
•Importantly, he and Mr. Tiphagne said that the Union government must include the Act in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution so that it gets protection under Article 31-B. This will protect the Act in the future from coming under judicial scrutiny that may dilute it.
•Mr. Thirumavalavan said it was unfortunate that the Act, which was lacking effective implementation, had been made ineffective in many ways by the Supreme Court judgement. “The implementation of the original 1989 Act was a failure. After a lot of struggle, amendments were made in 2015, which included some strong provisions. However, even that has not been implemented properly,” he said.
•Mr. Tiphagne said the restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court included the need for a preliminary enquiry before filing a case under the Act; obtaining permission from Superintendent of Police for arresting a person and the need for approval from the appointing authority of a government employee if a case was to be registered against the employee.
•He said that a majority of the political parties, including Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, VCK, Congress, Manithaneya Makkal Katchi, Social Democratic Party of India and Dravidar Viduthalai Kazhagam had voiced their support for the cause.
📰 Combating a needle phobia
Counselling would help diabetic patients administer injections themselves, finds Chennai-based study
•Around five years ago, when M. Balusamy, 72, was told he would need injections to control his diabetes, the retiree was apprehensive. “What if I had problems with the shots?” he wondered. Until then, he had been on tablets and a controlled diet. But given that he switched to injections, today his blood sugar is well under control.
Handling anxiety
•For many people with type 2 diabetes (a condition characterised by the body being unable to effectively use its natural insulin to control blood sugar) the prospect of self-administering injections appears scary. To determine if this anxiety could be handled through psychological counselling, the M.V. Hospital for Diabetes, Royapuram in Chennai recently conducted a study.
•One group of patients received psychological counselling after they had been told to start their injections in addition to the regular counselling from diabetes educators, while the control group only had the counselling with diabetes educators. All the patients were about to start injections for the first time. Results showed that those who received psychological counselling better overcame their fear of self-injecting and self-testing.
•“About 40% of people with diabetes require insulin injection after about six to eight years, when oral medications are not enough to bring down their blood sugar levels,” says Vijay Viswanathan, head of the hospital. But the thought of self-injecting made patients reluctant, he adds. They believed injections to be the last resort and wanted to avoid them or feared they would get used to them and later find it difficult to be weaned off them.
•“Reluctance on the part of the patient to start insulin injections when advised to do so can lead to poor control of diabetes and complications, including in the kidney and eyes,” he says. This is of particular concern in India, with the number of diabetic people in the country estimated to be 72 million. The Chennai-based study, published in the International Journal of Current Research , had 80 patients ranging from the ages of 30 to 70 and living with diabetes for at least two years.
•All patients were given a questionnaire to assess their fear of self-injection and self-testing. The group that got psychological counselling addressing their various concerns had a significant drop in their HBA1C levels, while the other group did not record much of a drop. HBA1C is a test to determine average blood sugar levels of the last three months. The first group also reported a lower fear of injections and self-testing than the other group.
•Studies from many parts of the world have revealed that a fear of injections is common among patients with type 2 diabetes and is associated with poor glycemic control and lower adherence to therapy.
Explaining it
•This fear, some researchers suggest, may have its roots in human evolution. In past centuries, even a non-fatal puncture wound could have caused a fatal infection and individuals who feared being struck by thorns or knives may have been less likely to die in accidents. Thus protecting oneself from jabs and pokes, the argument goes, could mean higher survival rates.
•“There are lots of myths about insulin and the fear of injecting it is very common,” says P. Dharmarajan, Director, Institute of Diabetology, Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital, Chennai. He says that it took time to convince patients to start it and most have tried to postpone it. “We have to counsel them to begin insulin. Patients should understand that it needs to be taken when required and that it is a life-saving hormone.”
•Jaichitra Suresh, consultant physician at SIMS Hospital, Vadapalani, Chennai, says the goal of treatment now is to start insulin early in order to preserve the insulin reserves in the body. “But most patients believe that starting insulin is the end and that it will lead to complications, when actually it is begun to keep blood sugar under control in order to avoid complications. If they are not advised properly, some even drop out of treatment,” she says.
•“Now that we know it helps, psychological counselling should be the norm for patients starting insulin for the first time, for them to overcome their fear of injections and help build confidence to take insulin regularly,” says Dr. Viswanathan. An article in Diabetes Update (Summer 2017), a publication of Diabetes UK, a charity for people affected by diabetes, spoke of the importance of needle selection and good injection techniques. Research into needle technology and newer modes of insulin delivery can also potentially help, it says.
📰 Let’s aid innovation
•Despite cancer being the primary focus of research and development across the world, only seven oncology drugs were introduced in India in the 2010-2014 period. In this time, nearly 50 breakthrough therapies were rolled out globally. What I have found more startling is the disparity in the availability of oncology therapies between 2006 to 2016. A study has found that less than a third of the 270 oncology molecules in existence are available in India, a country that is host to over 10 million cancer patients.
•In India, the incidence of cancer is on the rise, which can be mostly be attributed to a lack of awareness, and poor screening. Innovation is key to improving the quality of health care and health outcomes, apart from addressing unmet medical needs and overcoming inefficiencies within the system. Over the years, global bio-pharmaceutical organisations have contributed to the Indian market to provide broader access to innovative medicines and decrease the burden of cancer. It might come as a surprise that only 5% of the medicines used in India are patent-protected. Growing concern about the non-availability of new cancer drugs is quite evident, adding to other problems such as too few oncologists and inadequate infrastructure to diagnose and treat the disease. We need a robust system of intellectual property (IP) rights to incentivise and reward innovation and to inspire indigenous medical innovation in particular.
Need for a balance
•India must balance the need for innovation with the necessity of providing more affordable medicines within a robust IP environment. While Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that India should align its IP laws with global standards, his words must be backed by meaningful action at the policy level to ensure that India is able to realise its research potential and make the scientific advances that we are capable of.
•For instance, we can incentivise innovators to invest in research and partner with the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research (NIPER). India has a long way to go on the path to drug discovery, which is an expensive and complex process. True, affordable drugs are necessary but at the same time we also need new life-saving drugs to combat life-threatening diseases.
•According to a Tufts University study (2014), the average cost of developing a drug, including the cost of failure, is around $2.6 billion; it takes 10 years to bring a new molecule to the market. On the other hand, global bio-pharmaceutical innovators are gradually becoming sceptical of the current policy environment in India and the newest drugs become available to Indian patients years after they have been used in other parts of the world. Despite positive signs from the government, the signals have not yet translated into real change in either policy or practice. Pro-innovation policies are yet to take shape to aid in the advancement of the development of innovative medicines.
•Data from the U.S.’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that five-year survival has increased steadily in most developed countries for patients with childhood leukaemia, prostate and breast cancers. Some countries have even reported five-year survival rates of more than 85%. This has been possible largely due to innovation in global medicine. Treatment modes such as immunotherapy have also been changing cancer care for the better. However, the same cannot be said about India, which can be attributed mainly to our failure in accessing global innovation and nurturing domestic health-care innovation. As India gears up to meet the goal of universal health-care access, I hope to witness an increase in Indian innovation and a more hopeful future for cancer treatment.
📰 Genetic diversity can prevent rapid spread of infectious diseases
The team studied how susceptibility sub-populations affect the spread of the disease
•An infectious disease can spread at different rates in different countries. This phenomenon has been observed in many cases, for instance in the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. An International group of researchers including those at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, and The Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Chennai, looks at genetics as a way to explain this phenomenon. They find that the greater the genetic diversity in immune response, the stronger is the barrier to the spread of the disease. The results have recently been published in PLOS Computational Biology.
•Nagasuma Chandra’s team at IISc chose to study H1N1 as modelling it had some advantages.
•“There is a lot of work on H1N1 and a lot of data including clinical and epidemiological. These models are also best suited to study airborne diseases. As H1N1 spreads through air, choosing it made a lot of sense,” says Dr. Chandra.
Pandemic H1N1 virus
•The pandemic H1N1 2009 influenza A virus was different from other influenza viruses encountered until then. According to the WHO, this is because it originated from animal influenza viruses and is unrelated to the human seasonal H1N1 viruses that have been in circulation among people formany years In fact, this virus is thought to have arisen from a mixture of two viruses: a North American virus that jumped from birds to swine and humans and a Eurasian swine virus that had circulated in pigs for about a decade before entering humans. Clinically also the virus’s effect was very different from that of other flu viruses in that younger people were more severely affected than older ones.
•Narmada Sambataru and Sumanta Mukherjee who were at Dr Chandra’s lab, and Martin Lopez-Garcia from the University of Leeds, UK, spent nearly a year building up the model. Their research led them to establish how an individual’s genetic makeup can influence his or her susceptibility to the infection.
•The immune system has both innate and adaptive response types to infections, in general. In the case of H1N1 infection, the adaptive immune system can recognise the presence of a virus within the cell and respond to it only if a molecule called the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) binds to some fragment of the viral protein (epitope) and ‘presents’ it to the environment outside the cell. Dr Chandra’s group has described the details of this aspect of H1N1 in an earlier paper published in the journal Clinical and Translational Immunology.
Immune response
•“The main take-away from our work is that understanding how the immune response of different individuals leads to a spread of susceptibilities in a population is vital to figuring out how diseases spread,” says Gautam Menon of The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, a co-author of the paper. “This problem, of how to go from what we know about how individuals can vary in their susceptibility to understanding how epidemics spread across entire populations, has been identified recently as one of the major challenges in the study of epidemics.”
•Having worked out how the genetic makeup of an individual can affect their susceptibility to the disease, the individuals can be grouped according to their susceptibility. Using a mathematical model called the SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) model, the researchers study how the presence of susceptibility sub-populations affect the spread of the disease. “In this model, individuals are initially susceptible but not infected.
•“When an infection is introduced, individuals become infected at a rate determined by their estimated susceptibility to the pathogen, estimated using genetic information about the host as well as the pathogen. Infected individuals then proceed to recover,” says Dr Chandra.
Trends
•The work captures the qualitative features of well-known trends of influenza spread in various parts of the world. “This work uses publicly available information about HLA class-I genes and their prevalence in populations around the world. Unfortunately, there is a significant shortage of this information for Indian populations,” she says.
•The group is planning to propose a detailed study of this for Indian populations. “Once this information becomes available, we can do far more to predict disease spread in India. These predictions can be used to inform public policy and make better decisions. This is the real utility of such modeling methods, that we can explore different situations and ask what responses might be most effective in the context of specific diseases,” says Dr Menon.
📰 Microbes help in making hydrocarbons
Three gene additions and eight deletions were carried out to increase the hydrocarbon production rate
•Scientists at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB), New Delhi, have succeeded in engineering the metabolic pathway of Escherichia coli in such way that it would synthesise hydrocarbons of carbon chain length 15 and 17, which are the fundamental components of diesel. The results were recently published in Journal of Metabolic Engineering.
•They first added two genes from Cyanobacteria into E. coli. “Few cyanobacteria are known to produce a low quantity of alkane. So we put the genes responsible for this production into the laboratory bacteria. But then the production was very minimal. So we took the approach of in-silico metabolic pathway, and finally over-expressed a gene (zwf gene) and removed few genes from E. coliwhich resulted in significantly high hydrocarbon production,” explains Zia Fatma, Postdoc researcher and first author of the paper.
Additions and deletions
•The researchers also studied the phospholipid pathway of E. coli and made some gene deletions.
•A total of three gene additions and eight gene deletions were carried out to increase the hydrocarbon production rate and concentration.
•The added genes included those which code for cyanobacterial alkane producing enzymes and a host gene which can lead to availability of higher electrons needed for alkane production. The deletions helped in saving the substrate (glucose) from going to other competing products, and also helped in limiting the cell growth so that more carbon is available for alkane formation.
Cosmetic industries
•This pathway engineering also led to higher production of fatty alcohol, which has a role in cosmetic industries.
•Fed-batch cultivation of E.coli (culturing the bacteria in a bioreactor with continuous nutrition supply) was done - 3 litre of the substrate supplemented with glucose and other nutrient sources were used. The engineered bacteria were able to produce 2.54 g/L of alka(e)ne and 12.5 g/L of fatty acid in 72 hours.
•The report says that this is the highest production levels achieved so far by any microbial source.
•“Currently, most of our need for fuels is met by non-renewable crude petroleum. Few countries have commercialised biodiesel made via transesterification of vegetable oil, but they can only be blended in the proportion of 5-20% with diesel and are not compatible with the supply chain,” says Dr Syed Shams Yazdani, from Microbial Engineering group and corresponding author of the paper. “The production is currently only at the lab level. We have to integrate the engineered plasmid into the genome and go for mass production. We are working to bring about a ten-fold increase in the production and at the same time bring down the cost of the new product.”
📰 Bronze Age Egyptians’ strategy holds a message for our civilisation
Tel Aviv University researchers reveal how 3,000 years ago Egyptians managed a drought lasting over a hundred years
•More than 3,000 years ago the queen of the Hittites, who lived in what is now Turkey, sent a clay tablet to Ramses II, the Egyptian pharaoh, with an SOS: “I have no grain in my lands.”
•Previously, the two kingdoms had been at war. Now a severe drought was carving a path of destruction through the ancient Levant, killing crops, cattle and people.
Egyptians and Hittites
•But the Egyptians, unlike the Hittites, had anticipated a crisis and planned ahead for a food shortage, researchers at Tel Aviv University say. And in an attempt to stabilise their borders, the pharaohs appear to have mounted a relief effort, sending grain to their former enemies.
•In a study published in this year’s edition of the journal Egypt and the Levant,the researchers pieced together ancient evidence — including flint and bone records from the fallen city of Megiddo, fossilised pollen data from the Sea of Galilee and ancient cattle DNA — to shed light on how Bronze Age Egyptians foresaw and planned for a drought that would last from around 1250 B.C. to 1100 B.C.,while their ancient counterparts appeared to be less well prepared.
•Even with preparation, however, the Egyptian empire ultimately collapsed. But the study shows how recognising and preparing for climate disaster can make societies more resilient.
•“All this put together, you see a picture of a crisis and the reaction of an empire in order to try to stabilize the situation,” said Israel Finkelstein, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University and the lead author of the paper. “For a while they managed, and then it was too late.”
Prescient pharoahs
•For about a decade, archaeologists have known that widespread drought in the Mediterranean was a culprit in the fall of civilisations there in the Late Bronze Age. But it is only in this latest study that evidence of the pharaohs’ prescience has emerged: In anticipation of a crisis in their empire’s southeastern arid zones, ancient leaders ordered increased grain production in its greener parts, and crossbred local cattle with zebu, or humped cattle, to create a more heat-resistant plow animal, the researchers found.
•At the ancient ruins of Megiddo in northern Israel, Finkelstein and his colleagues also discovered sickle blades used for harvesting grain, and an unusually high frequency of cattle bones. The age of those bones indicates that the animals were used for plowing crops, rather than eaten, explained one of the paper’s authors, Lidar Sapir-Hen, an archaeozoologist from the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History at Tel Aviv University.
•These agricultural feats managed to extend the life of the Egyptian empire about half a century longer than it might otherwise have lasted, according to the archaeologists. The lesson for our own civilisation — which is likely to face increasingly severe droughts as humans change the climate far faster than nature has ever done — is to plan ahead, Finkelstein said.
•“This collapse of the Late Bronze Age is not just a matter of ancient history that has no relevance to us,” said Eric H. Cline, a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University, who worked at the Megiddo site for two decades but was not involved in this latest study.
•Just as drought was among the “stressors” leading to famine and war during the Bronze Age, Cline said, today’s droughts could amplify existing problems.
•“It’s a perfect storm: You’ve got not just drought and famine but there’s also earthquakes, there’s also invaders, and that’s what causes collapse,” he said, referring to a confluence of events which some think led to the end of the Bronze Age, which included powerful earthquakes in the region, and the invasion of the Levant by a group known as the Sea Peoples. The ancient world, like our own, was interdependent and suffered a “domino” fall, Cline added.
Coping mechanisms
•Gavin A. Schmidt, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, said that in some ways, modern civilisation had not advanced much in its coping mechanisms for climate crises. “If the sea is rising, you either get out of the way, or you get flooded; if there’s a drought, you either plant more drought-resistant crops, or you die,” he said. But, he added, modern humans possess much better predictive power and are therefore “the first generation who is able to take mitigation seriously.”
•Yet many countries are still behind on goals set as part of the 2015 Paris climate agreement. “This is the tragedy,” said John F. Haldon, a historian at Princeton University who studies how ancient civilisations coped with climatic upheaval. “Everyone’s aware of the problem but there’s a massive stasis in the system.”
•If a civilisation’s leadership “has feet of clay and isn’t willing to take the challenge on in an innovative way," Haldon said, “then often the challenge will overcome them.”
•Present-day humanity may have the resources and tools to deal with climate change, Haldon said, but action is often stifled by those who have a vested interest in denying the reality of human-caused climate change. “We seem to have the idea that people in ancient times or people in the past generally weren’t quite as clever as we are, but Homo sapiens is Homo sapiens, ” he said.
•“If it’s something that we are creating — and we see what happened the last time — I think we’d be foolish not to take steps to stop it," Cline said. “The problem is when we have deniers,” he added. “Then we’re no better off than the Hittites.”
📰 Masquerade in nature
A unique strategy’ in tiny leaf beetles
•Try locating a leaf beetle on a leaf. It’s difficult, and not just because these insects are tiny, barely half the size of our smallest fingernail. They have evolved a unique strategy to blend out of sight: they resemble the feeding marks – holes or scrapes – they make on leaves. This could be to avoid being seen by predators, say scientists.
•A leaf beetle systematically eats out small bits of the leaf it rests on, creating numerous holes or scrapes on it. These marks are as big and of a similar colour as the beetle itself, often making a predator mistake a dark beetle for a hole in the leaf.
•This deception even fooled entomologist Alexander Konstantinov (Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A.) on his beetle collection trips. Did leaf beetles across the world – there are more than 30,000 species – exhibit this masquerading strategy too?
•From field data collected over 16 years, Konstantinov and a team including scientist K. D. Prathapan from the Kerala Agricultural University in Thiruvananthapuram studied the colours and sizes of 119 leaf beetle species found worldwide (including 24 species from India), as well as the colour of the beetles’ feeding marks. They also studied photographs which had inadvertently recorded some of these beetles on plant leaves in Europe in the 1920s.
•A majority of the 119 beetles were found to be masqueraders.
•Their results, published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, show that masquerading beetles are small (about 4 mm long) and mostly feed on leaves exposed directly to the sun. They are uniformly dark- or light-coloured and their shells lack warning colours or contrasting patterns. The team find that beetle body colour is linked to the colour of their feeding marks: beetles that make dark feeding marks are dark in colour and those that make light-coloured marks, pale.
Which came first?
•That these beetles could have evolved to be dull and uniformly coloured because it makes them harder to spot is an interesting hypothesis, but the study has several gaps that need to be addressed, says scientist Deepa Agashe of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, who studies evolutionary and allied ecological processes and is not part of the study.
•“An alternative hypothesis is that the behaviours necessary to make light or dark-coloured damage (i.e. chewing partly or fully through the leaf) evolved later,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Hindu. “It needs to be tested more rigorously.”
📰 A new biological ‘switch’
•Scientists have discovered a new metabolic process in the body that can switch off inflammation.
•They found that ‘itaconate’ - a molecule derived from glucose - acts as a powerful off-switch for macrophages, which are the cells in the immune system that lie at the heart of many inflammatory diseases.
•“It is well known that macrophages cause inflammation, but we have just found that they can be coaxed to make a biochemical called itaconate,” said Luke O’Neill from Trinity College, Dublin in Ireland. “This functions as an important brake, or off-switch, on the macrophage, cooling the heat of inflammation in a process never before described,” O’Neill said.
•The discovery, published in the journal Nature, is very much on the frontier of inflammation research and the researchers are now exploring its relevance to the onset and development of inflammatory and infectious diseases.
•They are also keen to explore whether the findings can be exploited in the effort to develop new anti-inflammatory medicines.
•“The macrophage takes the nutrient glucose, whose day job it is to provide energy, and surprisingly turns it into itaconate,” said Evanna Mills from Trinity College, Dublin. “This then blocks production of inflammatory factors, and also protects mice from the lethal inflammation that can occur during infection,” Mills said.
