Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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WHO releases new global classification of diseases

News

• The World Health Organization (WHO) released its new International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

Beyond News

• The ICD is the foundation for identifying health trends and statistics worldwide, and contains around 55,000 unique codes for injuries, diseases and causes of death.
• It provides a common language that allows health professionals to share health information across the globe.
• ICD-11, which has been over a decade in the making, provides significant improvements on previous versions.
• Also for the first time, it is completely electronic and has a much more user-friendly format. And there has been unprecedented involvement of health care workers who have joined collaborative meetings and submitted proposals.
• This release is an advance preview that will allow countries to plan how to use the new version, prepare translations, and train health professionals all over the country. The ICD is also used by health insurers, whose reimbursements depend on ICD coding; national health programme managers; data collection specialists; and others who track progress in global health and determine the allocation of health resources.
• The new ICD-11 also reflects progress in medicine and advances in scientific understanding.
• ICD-11 is also able to better capture data regarding safety in health care, which means that unnecessary events that may harm health – such as unsafe workflows in hospitals can be identified and reduced.
• The new ICD also includes new chapters, one on traditional medicine: although millions of people use traditional medicine worldwide, it has never been classified in this system.

Kerala most at risk of cardiovascular disease, finds national survey

News

• Two recent national surveys of nearly 8,00,000 adults between 34 and 70 years, has found that people of Kerala across sexes  were most at risk of cardiovascular diseases while those in Jharkhand were least likely to have the condition.

Findings

• A gender break down, however, puts the women of Goa at highest mean cardiovascular risk at 16.73% while men in Himachal Pradesh and Nagaland were most vulnerable with mean cardiovascular risk of 24.23%.
• The studies, found wide variations in the average 10-year risk of a fatal or nonfatal cardiovascular disease event among States.
• The study found that adults in urban areas, as well as those with a higher household wealth, tended to have a greater cardiovascular risk.
• With 19.90%, adults living in urban areas in Kerala had the highest mean risk, followed by West Bengal (19.12%) and Himachal Pradesh (18.97%).
• In contrast, those living in urban areas of Daman and Diu had the lowest mean risk (12.60%), followed by Bihar (13.63%) and Arunachal Pradesh (14.71%).
• In general, the cardiovascular risk is lower in rural areas compared with urban areas.
• In the case of Kerala, the difference between highest mean risk in rural (19.23%) and urban areas (19.90%) is meagre.
• The surveys covered 27 of the 29 States and five of the seven Union Territories.
• While smoking (a risk factor for CVD) was more prevalent in poorer households and rural areas, wealthy households and urban locations faced risks from high body mass index, high blood glucose and high systolic blood pressure.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

New type of photosynthesis discovered

News

• A new study published in Sciencesays that certain bacteria don’t need white light, and instead use far-red light for photosynthesis.

Beyond News

• The wavelength of visible light or white light is 400 to 700 nanometre, and till now botanists and plant biologists believed that all plants used red light( 680 to 700 nm) for oxygenic photosynthesis.
• The new study shows that many cyanobacteria or blue-green algae can carry out photosynthesis in the far red light or near infrared light of 750 nm.
• Another interesting find of the study is that in cyanobacteria, a different kind of chlorophyll was involved in photosynthesis.
• All photosynthetic organisms use chlorophyll-a for the process, but the researchers found that when cyanobacteria was grown in near- infrared light, chlorophyll a shuts down and a special chlorophyll, chlorophyll-f, performs the same task.
• Chlorophyll-f, which was long believed to be a helper in harvesting light, has now been found to play an important role in photosynthesis in shaded environments.
• Though another cyanobacterium, Acaryochloris, has already been reported to be using beyond red limit, it was thought to be one of a kind. But this study has shown that the new method is widespread and could even represent a new type of photosynthesis unknown to science. These insights can help researchers engineer food crops that can grow in wide light ranges.

This supermassive black hole shredded a star

News

• For the first time, astronomers have directly imaged the formation and expansion of a fast-moving jet of material ejected when a supermassive black hole ripped apart a star that wandered too close to the cosmic monster.

Beyond News

• The scientists tracked the event with radio and infrared telescopes, including the National Science Foundation’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), in a pair of colliding galaxies called Arp 299, nearly 150 million light-years from Earth.
• At the core of one of the galaxies, a black hole 20 million times more massive than the Sun shredded a star more than twice the Sun’s mass, setting off a chain of events that revealed important details of the violent encounter.
• Only a small number of such stellar deaths, called tidal disruption events, or TDEs, have been detected, although scientists have hypothesised that they may be a more common occurrence.
• As time passed, the new object stayed bright at infrared and radio wavelengths, but not in visible light and X-rays.
• The most likely explanation is that thick interstellar gas and dust near the galaxy’s centre absorbed the X-rays and visible light, then re-radiated it as infrared.
• Most galaxies have supermassive black holes, containing millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, at their cores. In a black hole, the mass is so concentrated that its gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape.

An eco-friendly invention

News

• Scientists have developed a material using fly ash a by-product of coal-fired power plants – that can replace cement in concrete, paving the way for greener buildings and structures in the future.

Beyond News

• Fly ash binder does not require the high-temperature processing of cement, yet tests showed it has the same compressive strength after seven days of curing.
• It also requires only a small fraction of the sodium-based activation chemicals used to harden cement. The material is cementless and environment friendly.
• Over 20 billion tonnes of concrete are produced around the world every year in a manufacturing process that contributes 5 to 10 per cent of carbon dioxide to global emissions, surpassed only by transportation and energy as the largest producers of the greenhouse gas.

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