Current Affairs - Health & Disease

A boy infected with the Nipah virus has died in Kerala, a state already hit badly by Covid-19

There is a Norovirus outbreak in the United Kingdom - a very contagious virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea also called "winter vomiting bug".

China has reported its first death by viral infection called the Monkey B virus after a veterinarian infected, after he dissected two dead monkeys.

The World Health Organization has issued new recommendations on human genome editing.

• Recently, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare declared the results of a serological survey carried out in Delhi between 27^th June and 10^th July, 2020.

• Recently, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) approved the use of rapid antigen detection test in containment zones and healthcare settings in combination with the RT-PCR test.

• As part of COVID-19 mitigation mission of Country, CSIR-IIIM, Jammu a constituent laboratory of CSIR has partnered with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) to develop and scale-up a new Reverse Transcriptase-Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (RT-LAMP) based COVID-19 diagnostic kit.

• The central government has advised authorities in Assam to go for culling of pigs affected by the African Swine Fever (ASF) after thousands were found to have died from the illness in the past several weeks.

• As medical practitioners around the world are busy treating people for Covid-19, many have reported a condition called ‘silent’ or ‘happy’ hypoxia, in which patients have extremely low blood oxygen levels, yet do not show signs of breathlessness.

• Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum, an Institute of National Importance, of the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has developed a diagnostic test kit that can confirm COVID19 in 2 hours at low cost.