India’s Fight to Combat Hepatitis
Syllabus: GS2/Health
In News
- India is systematically strengthening its efforts to combat hepatitis, with the National Viral Hepatitis Control Programme aiming to eliminate the disease as a public health threat by 2030.
What is Hepatitis?
- Hepatitis is an inflammation of the liver, caused by hepatitis viruses or even other infections, toxic substances such as alcohol and drugs, and autoimmune diseases.
- There are five major types of hepatitis viruses — Hepatitis A, B, C, D and E. Among these, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C are the most serious public health concerns as they can become chronic infections and may lead to liver cirrhosis and liver cancer.
Modes of Transmission, Prevention and Management
| Hepatitis Virus | Causes / Transmission | Prevention & Treatment |
| Hepatitis A (HAV) | Faecal-oral route via contaminated food/waterPoor sanitation and lack of safe drinking water | Prevention: Safe drinking water, hygiene and sanitation measuresTreatment: Usually Self-limiting. Supportive care (hydration/nutrition). No specific antiviral |
| Hepatitis B (HBV) | Most commonly: Mother-to-child at birthContact with infected blood and blood products and body fluids etc | Prevention: Hepatitis B Vaccine under the Universal Immunization Program (birth dose at the earliest and certainly within 24 hours of birth, at 6,10 and 14 weeks of birth)Treatment: Chronic hepatitis B is managed with antiviral medication amongst those eligible as per the national guidelines. |
| Hepatitis C (HCV) | Exposure to blood from unsafe injections/ proceduresSharing needles/syringesContact with infected blood and blood products and body fluids etc | Prevention: Adopting harm reduction measures (needle exchange), safe injection practices. There is no vaccine to prevent hepatitis C infectionTreatment: Cured in 12-24 weeks in nearly all patients using pan-genotypic regimen with Direct-Acting Antiviral (DAAs) drugs. |
| Hepatitis D (HDV) | Contact with infected blood and blood products and body fluids, etcInfection only amongst some chronic HBV carriers | Prevention: By preventing the underlying HBV infection, the Hepatitis B vaccine concurrently confers full protection against HDV infection. |
| Hepatitis E (HEV) | Faecal-oral route via contaminated food/waterPoor sanitation and lack of safe drinking water | Prevention: Safe drinking water, hygiene and sanitation measuresTreatment: Usually Self-limiting. Supportive care (hydration/nutrition). No specific antiviral drugs |
India’s Steps
- Hepatitis has been recognised as a public health problem in India. In 2018, the Government launched the National Viral Hepatitis Program to combat this disease by providing screening and treatment services.
- This is in line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of combating various viral diseases.
- It has a comprehensive preventive, promotive and curative approach to eliminate viral hepatitis by increasing awareness, improving access to diagnosis and treatment, and providing free diagnostics and medicines for Hepatitis B and C.
- It deals with Hepatitis A, B, C, D and E. Hepatitis A and E are under surveillance through the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme (IDS).
Source: PIB
Corporate Mitra Scheme
Syllabus: GS2/Governance
Context
- The Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA), Shillong organised a webinar for awareness of the Corporate Mitra Scheme.
Corporate Mitra Scheme
- The Corporate Mitra Scheme is an initiative of Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) and administered by Indian Institute of Corporate Affairs (IICA).
- The purpose is to enhance the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) ecosystem by building a cadre of trained and accredited Corporate Mitras (paraprofessionals) providing affordable business and compliance help.
- The scheme targets tier-2 and tier-3 cities, which have less access to professional consulting services for MSMEs.
- The scheme is intended to teach 2,000 participants all throughout the country including 200 candidates from the North Eastern Region in the first phase, who will be provided 50% concession on the course fee.
Source: PIB
Bank of Baroda (BoB) Data Leaks on Dark Web
Syllabus: GS3/Cyber Security
In News
- Bank of Baroda (BoB) was hit by a cyberattack after one of its employee’s email accounts was compromised, allegedly leading to a leak of about 1 TB of customer and corporate banking data on the dark web.
Do you know?
- The World Wide Web is broadly divided into the Surface Web, Deep Web, and Dark Web.
- The Surface Web consists of publicly indexed websites accessible through search engines like Google.
- The Deep Web contains unindexed content such as private databases, government and corporate intranets, and password-protected resources.
- The Dark Web is a hidden part of the Deep Web that requires specialized software like Tor (The Onion Router) or I2P (Invisible Internet Project) to access, offering users a high degree of anonymity.
Dark Web
- It is a section of the internet that is intentionally concealed and cannot be found by regular search engines or browsers.
- It requires special software like Tor (The Onion Router) or I2P (Invisible Internet Project) that use encrypted overlay networks to provide a high degree of anonymity to users and website operators.
- The Dark Web uses onion routing, which means internet traffic is encrypted in layers and sent through a series of relay nodes run by volunteers – meaning no single node knows the source and destination of the data.
- Hidden services hide the location of the servers .
Applications
- Legitimate uses include privacy protection, censorship circumvention, free speech, secure communications for journalists, whistleblowers, activists and businesses, and protection of sensitive communications.
- Law enforcement agencies also leverage the Dark Web for surveillance, undercover and anonymous tip line operations, and cybercrime investigations.
- Illegitimate uses include darknet markets trafficking illicit drugs, counterfeit documents, stolen financial data, hacking tools, malware, cybercrime services, and other illegal goods .
- Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Monero are often used for these transactions.
Source: TH
AI Data Centres to Add 26.3 GW load by 2031-32: Power Ministry
Syllabus: GS3/Infrastructure
Context
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centres will put an additional load of 26.3 gigawatts (GW) by 2031-32, the Ministry of Power informed the parliament.
About
- This additional load is expected to be integrated into the grid and will primarily be served by renewable energy capacity.
- The fresh projection is almost double the government’s earlier projection in March this year when it estimated that electricity demand from data centres will reach 13.56 GW by 2031-32.
- A data center is a physical room, building or facility that houses IT infrastructure for building, running and delivering applications and services.
- It also stores and manages the data associated with those applications and services.
Data Centres in India
- India is expected to witness a sharp increase in data centre capacity in the coming years.
- From a mere 375 megawatt (MW) data centre capacity in 2020, India’s current capacity stood at around 1.5 GW by 2025.
- India’s operational data centre capacity will increase to 12 GW by 2030, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 40%.
- AI-dedicated capacity is expected to expand nearly 24-fold over the same period, rising from 275 MW to 6,546 MW.
- As hyperscale cloud providers, enterprise digitalisation and artificial intelligence accelerate demand for computer infrastructure.
Source: IE
Kimi K3
Syllabus: GS3/ Science & Technology
Context
- Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has temporarily paused new subscriptions for its AI chatbot after overwhelming demand for its newly launched Kimi K3 model exhausted available GPU computing capacity.
What is Kimi K3?
- Kimi K3 is a new large language model (LLM) developed by Moonshot AI, a Chinese artificial intelligence startup.
- It has demonstrated frontier-level performance in coding and reasoning benchmarks, with results comparable to leading AI models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic on several tasks.
- The model is expected to be released as an open-weight model, allowing developers to download and run it locally.
What are Open-Weight AI Models?
- An open-weight AI model is a model whose trained parameters (weights) are made publicly available.
- Features: Developers can download, run, fine-tune, and modify the model.
- The model can operate on private infrastructure without depending entirely on the developer’s cloud service.
Large Language Models (LLMs)
- A large language model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that uses deep learning techniques and massively large data sets to understand, summarize, generate and predict new content.
- Deep learning involves the probabilistic analysis of unstructured data, which eventually enables the deep learning model to recognize distinctions between pieces of content without human intervention.
- It helps to understand how characters, words, and sentences function together.
Source: IE
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