Current Affairs - Health & Disease

Cases of ‘tomato flu’ were recently reported from Kerala among children below 5 years of age.

About Tomato flu

• “Tomato flu is an unidentified fever. It is a viral disease that causes rashes or blisters, skin irritation and dehydration.

On 24th March 2022 (World TB Day), the Union Govt. has launched Data-Driven Research to Eradicate TB - “Dare2eraD TB”.

It is a joint initiative between the Ministry of Science & Technology and the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, led by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT).

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.