DAILY NEWS ANALYSIS

Monthly DNA

17 Dec, 2023

14 Min Read

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Paper	Topics	Subject
GS-II	Kidney Transplants in India	Governance
GS-III	Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023	Economic Issues
GS-III	Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME)	S&T
PT Pointer	Cyclone Jasper	Physical Geography
	AKTOCYTE	S&T
	‘Mission Antarctica’	Governance
	Pro Bono Legal Service Programme	Governance

GS-II : Governance Health

The Indian government has ordered a probe into an allegation that poor Myanmarese villagers were being lured into giving their kidneys to rich patients.

Regulated by– Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act, 1994.

A transplant can be either
- From organs of deceased persons donated by their relatives
- From a living person the recipient knows

Only 16% of the total transplants in the India use deceased organs.

Types of donations

- Donations from close relatives
- Donations from unrelated persons (Altruistic donations)

Donations from close relatives	Donations from unrelated persons
The 1994 Act allows living donations, in most cases, from close relatives (parents, siblings, children, spouse, grandparents, grandchildren). For donations involving either Indians or foreigners, documents establishing their identities, family tree, proving the donor-recipient relationship and financial standing of the donor have to be submitted.	It involves donations from distant relatives, in-laws, or long-time friends are allowed after additional scrutiny. For donations from unrelated persons, documents and photographic evidence showing their long-term association have to be submitted which is then examined by an external committee.

Organ donations and transplants in exchange for money are forbidden in India.
Punishment - Offering to pay for organs or document forgery is punishable by jail up to 10 years and a fine of up to Rs 1 crore.

National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization (NOTTO) under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, is the apex centre for coordination and networking for the registry, donation and transplantation of organs and tissues in India.

Reasons for higher kidney transplantation scam

- Higher demand for kidney due to increase in kidney failures
- Least risk to the donor
- Cheaper than other transplantations
- Higher survival time of kidneys

Kidney can survive up to 24-36 hours outside the body, the largest among other organs while the lungs remain viable only for 4-6 hours, and the liver for 8-12 hours.

Guidelines

In India, Transplantation of Human Organs Act, 1994 provides various regulations for the removal of human organs and its storage. It also regulates the transplantation of human organs for therapeutic purposes and for the prevention of commercial dealings in human organs.

Highlights of the New Guidelines?

Removed Age Cap:
- The upper age limit has been removed as people are now living longer.
  - Earlier, according to the NOTTO (National Organ and Tissue Transplant Organization) guidelines, an end-stage organ failure patient above 65 years of age was prohibited from registering to receive the organ.
No Domicile Requirement:
- The ministry has removed the domicile requirement to register as an organ recipient in a particular state under a ‘One Nation, One Policy’ move.
- Now a needy patient can register to receive an organ in any state of his or her choice and will also be able to get the surgery done there.
No Fees for Registration:
- There will be no registration fee that states used to charge for this purpose, the Centre has asked states that used to charge for such registration to not do so.
- Among the states that sought money for registration were Gujarat, Telangana, Maharashtra, and Kerala.
  - Certain states asked for anything between Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000 to register a patient on the organ recipient waitlist.

Note

NOTTO is set up under Directorate General of Health Services, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, located in New Delhi.
National Network division of NOTTO functions as apex centre for all India activities for procurement, distribution and registry of organs and tissues donation and transplantation in the country.

What is the Purpose of New Guidelines?

The Centre is planning to make changes in the rules of Transplantation of Human Organs (Amendment) Act 2011 towards creating a national policy for transplantation.
Currently, different states have different rules; the Union government is considering changes to the rules so that there is a standard criterion followed in all states across the country.
However, Health being a state subject, the rules formed by the central government will not be binding on the states.
The steps are aimed at better and more equitable access to organs and also to promote cadaver donations, which currently form a minuscule fraction of all organ transplants carried out in India.

What is the Scenario of Organ Transplantation in India?

India conducts the third highest number of transplants in the world.
Organs from deceased donors accounted for nearly 17.8% of all transplants in 2022.
The total number of deceased organ transplants climbed from 837 in 2013 to 2,765 in 2022.
The total number of organ transplants – with organs from both deceased and living donors – increased from 4,990 in 2013 to 15,561 in 2022.
Every year, an estimated 1.5-2 lakh people need a kidney transplant.
- Only around 10,000 got one in 2022. Of the 80,000 people who required a liver transplant, less than 3,000 got one in 2022.
- And, of the 10,000 who needed a heart transplant, only 250 got it in 2022.

Source:

Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023

GS-III : Economic Issues Economic Data

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations launched the Regional Overview of Food Security and Nutrition 2023: Statistics and Trends report.

The FAO report is a glimpse on the progress in meeting Sustainable Development Goals and World Health Assembly (WHA) global nutrition targets.

Findings

74.1% of Indians (2020 – 76.2%) were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021, Pakistan (82.2%), and in Bangladesh (66.1%) of the population faced difficulties in finding healthy food.
Rising food costs, if not matched by rising income, will lead to more people unable to afford a healthy diet, the report warned.
The report said during the COVID-19 pandemic and the 5Fs crisis, Food, Feed, Fuel, Fertilizers, and Finance, the region witnessed harrowing statistics.
The latest statistics indicate that the region, with 370.7 million undernourished people, continues to represent half of the global total.
Similarly, the Asia and the Pacific region accounts for half of the world’s severe food insecurity, with more women than men being food insecure.
The report said 16.6% of the country’s population is undernourished.
The region, according to the report, had a lower prevalence for both moderate or severe and severe food insecurity when compared with the world prevalence since 2015.

Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)

Established - In 1945, in Quebec City, Canada, the first session of the newly created United Nations establishes the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

The FAO is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger.

Aim - It aims to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives.

Members - With 195 members (194 countries and the European Union), FAO works in over 130 countries worldwide.

Headquarters - During its commencement Washington D.C. was designated as a temporary FAO headquarters, at present the headquarters is at Rome, Italy.

Source:

Graph Networks for Materials Exploration (GNoME)

GS-III : S&T Artificial Intelligence

GNoME, an AI tool, is accelerating the materials discovery using artificial intelligence (AI).

It is a state-of-the-art graph neural network (GNN) model that uses ‘active learning’ to enhance its performance, allowing it to predict the stability of new materials.

Launched by – Google DeepMind

Aim - To generate novel candidate crystals and to predict their stability.

Deep learning is a method of artificial intelligence (AI) where it is taught to process data in a way that is inspired by a human computer.

Working – GnoME can generate predictions for the structures of novel, stable crystals which were then tested, resulting in high-quality training data fed back into model training.

The final step in their approach exploits Density Functional Theory (DFT), a method to verify the stability of the new structures, which are then used as new training datasets for the tool.
The Materials Project is the original datasheet for GNoME.

The Materials Project is a multi-institution, multi-national endeavour to compute the properties of all inorganic materials and provide the data for every materials researcher free of charge.

Significance – It has boosted the precision rate for predicting materials stability from 50% to around 80%.
It increases the number of ‘stable materials’ by 10-fold including inorganic crystals that modern tech applications use.

It has published a list of 381,000 of the 2.2 million crystal structures that it predicts to be most stable.

Source:

Cyclone Jasper

GS-I : Physical Geography Cyclone

Jasper is a Tropical Cyclone that formed in the north coast of Queensland in Australia.

Source:

AKTOCYTE

GS-III : S&T Health

AKTOCYTE is a nutraceutical developed by the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) and IDRS Labs.

The tablets are intended for radiotherapy patients, especially those with pelvic cancer suffering from radiotherapy-induced Cystitis (Blood in urine).

Source:

‘Mission Antarctica’

GS-II : Governance Policies and Programmes

Union Minister of State for Defence flagged in a team of Himalayan Mountaineering Institute, Darjeeling that carried out ‘Mission Antarctica’ in New Delhi Recently.
The team hoisted the national flag atop Mt Rhenock in Sikkim Himalayas, recorded in the Asia Book of Records and India Book of Records.

During the expedition, the team also displayed the Tri-colour over Mount Vinson Peak, which is the highest peak of the South Pole.

Source:

Pro Bono Legal Service Programme

GS-II : Governance Governance

It is an initiative of the Department of Justice, launched in April 2017.
It aimed at enhancing "access to justice" for marginalised sections of the society and the state's constitutional obligation of providing "free legal aid" for all.

Pro bono is a Latin phrase that means "for the good of the people".

Source:

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