Srinagar: In a major boost to the Panchayati Raj Institutions in Jammu and Kashmir, the administration amended rules to give Block Development Council chairpersons a status equivalent to that of an Army brigadier.
According to the warrant of precedence issued by the Hospitality and Protocol Department of Jammu and Kashmir, BDC chairpersons have been placed at serial number 28.
They are placed alongside district magistrates, district and sessions judge, major heads of departments, presidents of municipal committees and municipal councils and officers of the rank of brigadier.
The precedence is meant for state and ceremonial occasions, the notification read. (KNS)
Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Thursday recorded seven more deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic taking the number of people who died due to the virus so far in the UT to 284
Officials told news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that seven patients who died include a 57-year-old male from Firdous Abad Batamallo Srinagar, a 55-year-old male from Nawakadal Srinagar, a 52-year-old woman from Zonimar Srinagar, a 46-year old woman from Gazriyal Kupwara, a 60-year old non local resident a 70-year old lady from Uri Baramulla and a 40-year-old from Chinkral Mohalla, Habba Kadal, Srinagar.
An official from SKIMS said that a man from Firdousabad was admitted on July 10 and a man from Nawakadal was admitted on 13 July with underlying ailments died at SKIMS on Thursday.
He said that woman from Zonimer was admitted on 22 July while as woman from Gazriyal was admitted on 20 July and was tested positive on Thursday after her death.
He further added that a 60 year old man who is said to be from Kerala also died at SKIMS who was tested positive for COVID-19
An official from Baramulla told KNO that a 70-year old dialysis patient from Uri with CRF, varian mass and Metastatic mitotic disease and was critically ill
Her dialysis was done at a private hospital in Srinagar and after dialysis she was advised to go home and come after one week for dialysis, he said, adding that she was sampled because of co morbidity by CMO Srinagar and in late hours result was positive and next day she expired and was buried as per COVID-19 protocol.
He further added that all primary contacts of the patient have been traced and put under quarantine.
A resident of Chinkral Mohalla, Habba Kadal, aged 40, became the seventh victim of COVID-19. “He was admitted in SKIMS, Soura on July 18 and had underlying medical conditions. He was tested positive for the virus,” a doctor at SKIMS, said.
With seven more deaths, the death toll related to COVID-19 in J&K has reached to 284 including 264 from Kashmir division and 20 from Jammu division—(KNO)
SRINAGAR: Divisional Commissioner Kashmir P K Pole Thursday said that violation of health advisories and guidelines resulted in a surge of COVID-19 cases in the valley.
Jammu and Kashmir has reported 15711 positive cases until Wednesday. The worst affected is the valley where maximum cases have been reported. The Divisional Commissioner has stressed upon strictly using masks and adhering other government health guidelines.
“Government is concerned about people neglecting health advisories and guidelines resulting in surge of COVID-19 cases in the valley,” Divisional Commissioner Kashmir told news agency Kashmir Indepth News Service (KINS).
As per the advisory, early detection of COVID-19 can prevent the spread of disease so we need to be responsible for the well-being of ourselves and everyone around us. “Not disclosing symptoms could put the life of individuals and their families at risk. In case of symptoms like fever, cough and difficulty in breathing report early. Do not fear, call COVID-19 helpline numbers and seek medical advice,” the advisory reads.
Advisory has further exhorted upon the people not to step out of home, unless absolutely necessary. “If you have to move out for unavoidable reasons, ensure that you wear a mask and practice social distancing, personal hygiene and frequent hand washing with soap and water,” it reads.(KINS)
Rs 5 Cr each for setting up additional testing labs, equipment, other things
Srinagar: Amid spike in COVID cases, the government on Thursday sanctioned Rs 15 Crore under SDRF for SK Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), Soura, Government Medical Colleges (GMC) Srinagar and Jammu.
The decision to sanction Rs five Crore each to the three health institutions was taken in a State Executive Committee meeting headed by the Chief Secretary BVR Subrahmanyam.
Officials told the news agency—Kashmir News Observer (KNO) that Rs 15 Crore has been sanctioned under SDRF for SKIMS, GMC Jammu, and GMC Srinagar.
“Rs 5 Crore each has been sanctioned for the trio health institutions for setting up of additional testing labs, equipment, for PPEs and other COVID containment efforts.
“The amount sanctioned is over and above funds provided to Health department,” officials said—(KNO)
In a report, the Forum for Human Rights in J&K said the 11-month lockdown since last August hugely impacted public health & violated the basic rights of the people.
The Print
Representational Picture
Srinagar: The Forum for Human Rights in Jammu and Kashmir Wednesday released a report in which it said that the developments in the union territory after the scrapping of Article 370 last August have “highlighted a tri-lateralisation of the dispute over Kashmir between India, Pakistan and China” and added a “new edge to the strategic China-Pakistan nexus against India”.
Formed in May this year, the forum in its first report — titled ‘Jammu and Kashmir: The Impact of Lockdowns on Human Rights August 2019-July 2020 — has launched a scathing attack against the central and the J&K administration for the steps and actions taken after 5 August, and added that the decision to scrap the erstwhile state’s special status has left the people, especially the youth, gravely disturbed.
“Kashmir has in many ways been the litmus test of Indian democracy. As this report indicates, we have failed miserably,” according to the report.
Representational Picture
Under a section called the ‘Overall Security Situation’, the group stated that Pakistan’s seven-decade efforts to “fish in troubled waters” went into an overdrive mode after the August development in J&K as the country ramped up cross-LoC firing and infiltration, and continued inciting and radicalising Kashmiris through virulent social media campaigns and by establishing “Kashmir Cells in its missions abroad as part of Kashmir-specific anti-India information war strategy”.
“China’s attempts to mobilise the UN Security Council against the August changes, and its own army’s May 2020 intrusions in Eastern Ladakh have added further diplomatic and security concerns for the Indian government.”
“They have also highlighted a tri-lateralisation of the dispute over Kashmir between India, Pakistan and China, lending a new edge to the strategic China-Pakistan nexus against India, specifically in Jammu and Kashmir,” stated the 70-page report.
The forum and the report
The report has been compiled based on NGO fact-finding reports and also responses to questionnaires sent to government sources, media, as well as information gathered through petitions and from industry bodies such as the Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Besides former Supreme Court judge (retd) Justice Madan Lokur, members of the forum include well-known personalities such as Air Vice Marshal (retd) Kapil Kak, Major General (retd) Ashok Kumar Mehta, Justice (retd) Ajit Prakash Shah and current National Conference leader and Anantnag MP Justice (retd) Hasnain Masoodi.
The 21-member group also has historian Ramachandra Guha, former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao, Lieutenant General (retd) H.S. Panag and author-academic Radha Kumar as its members.
The forum has studied the impact of the 5 August decision on civilian security, children and youth, industry and employment, health and media, and recommended 13 corrective measures that are needed to be taken on an immediate basis.
Violation of human rights
The report stated that central government’s prioritisation of counter-insurgency concerns over human security has led to an across the board violation of human rights, including the vitiation of protections such as habeas corpus, illegal detention, arrests, and misuse of draconian legislations such as the Public Safety Act (PSA) and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) to stifle dissent.
“In the same manner, the 11 months of lockdown — comprising closures, barricades, checkpoints and restrictions on mobile telephones and internet connectivity — have enormously impacted public health, and caused trauma and stress among the people of Jammu and Kashmir, violating the rights to health and medical care under the Indian, and Jammu and Kashmir, Constitutions.”
“The rights of children to a trauma-free environment have been arbitrarily ignored,” the report added.
Impact of mobile data restrictions
The report further went on to say: “The impact on education has been particularly severe. Schools and colleges functioned for barely 100 days between 2019 and 2020. After the pandemic lockdown, limiting networks to 2G has made it impossible for online classes to function adequately.”
“Local and regional industries have suffered large losses in almost every sector. Companies that are heavily or solely reliant on 4G networks that are available in the rest of the country, such as tourism and cottage industries, have been forced out of business. The new domicile rules introduced by the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Jammu and Kashmir administration, moreover, erode prior employment protections for permanent residents of the former state,” stated the report.
The report also concluded that journalists have been harassed and slapped with draconian charges such as the UAPA. “The new media policy is a death blow to an independent media and the freedom of expression,” the report stated.
The group has also studied the post-Covid 19 situation in J&K and how the consecutive lockdown has impacted key business sectors, health infrastructure, education and employment in the region.
Release political detainees
In its recommendation section, the forum asked for release of all the remaining political detainees, an amendment to the controversial PSA, strict implementation of juvenile protection legislation, withdrawal of charges under the UAPA against journalists and activists, and restoration of high speed internet.
Reinstating all the statutory oversight human rights bodies of the former state that ceased to exist after the scrapping of Article 370, roll back of the new media policy, compensation to businesses and people whose homes were destroyed in counter-insurgency operations were the other recommendations.
Radha Kumar, a specialist on peace and security, and a member of the Group of Interlocutors for J&K appointed by the central government (2010-11), told ThePrint that she hopes that the authorities take cognisance of the recommendations made by the forum.
“Unfortunately realism tells me we can have very few expectations. However, one would hope that there would be some impact. I would hope MPs and elected representatives take up some of the issues,” she said.
“It is shocking that almost an entire year has passed and you are denying children proper rights to education, you are denying doctors proper rights to knowledge and treatment,” she added.
Srinagar: A 53-year-old, an employee of Jal Shakti Department, died of covid-19, taking the fatality count due to the virus in Jammu and Kashmir to 279.
A resident of Nawa Kadal area of Srinagar, the quinquagenarian died at SKIMS Soura, officials told GNS.
With these deaths, 259 people in Kashmir and 20 in Jammu have died so far due to the covid-19.
Srinagar district with 75 deaths has the highest fatalities followed by Baramulla (58), Kulgam (26), 19 each in Shopian and Anantnag, Budgam (20), fifteen each in Pulwama and Kupwara, Jammu(12), Bandipora (7), Ganderbal (5), two each in Rajouri and Doda and one each in Poonch, Udhampur, and Kathua. (GNS)
WHO is working to ensure fair vaccine distribution, but in the meantime it is key to suppress the virus’s spread, said Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s emergencies programme, as daily new cases around the globe are at near-record levels.
Researchers are making “good progress” in developing vaccines against COVID-19, with a handful in late-stage trials, but their first use cannot be expected until early 2021, a World Health Organization (WHO) expert said on Wednesday.
People line up behind a health care worker at a mobile Coronavirus testing site at the Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles (AP)
WHO is working to ensure fair vaccine distribution, but in the meantime it is key to suppress the virus’s spread, said Mike Ryan, head of WHO’s emergencies programme, as daily new cases around the globe are at near-record levels.
“We’re making good progress,” Ryan said, noting that several vaccines were now in phase 3 trials and none had failed, so far, in terms of safety or ability to generate an immune response.
“Realistically it is going to be the first part of next year before we start seeing people getting vaccinated,” he told a public event on social media.
WHO was working to expand access to potential vaccines and to help scale-up production capacity, Ryan said.
“And we need to be fair about this, because this is a global good. Vaccines for this pandemic are not for the wealthy, they are not for the poor, they are for everybody,” he said.
The U.S. government will pay $1.95 billion to buy 100 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Pfizer Inc and German biotech BioNTech if it proves safe and effective, the companies said.
Ryan also cautioned schools to be careful about re-opening until community transmission of COVID-19 is under control. Debate in the United States over restarting education has intensified, even as the pandemic flares up in dozens of states.
“We have to do everything possible to bring our children back to school, and the most effective thing we can do is to stop the disease in our community,” he said. “Because if you control the disease in the community, you can open the schools.”
Association for Democratic Reforms analysis finds that 89% have declared assets estimated at over ₹1 crore.
About a quarter of the sitting Rajya Sabha members have declared criminal cases against themselves, according to an analysis of their self-sworn affidavits by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) released on Wednesday.
With three seats vacant and Kerala MP K.K. Ragesh’s affidavit being unavailable, the ADR report said an analysis of 229 of the 233 Rajya Sabha seats that represent the States and Union Territories showed that 54 MPs or 24% had declared criminal cases.
Out of the 229 MPs, which included the newly-elected representatives taking the oath on Wednesday, 28 or 12% had declared serious criminal cases. The report stated that 14 of 77 BJP MPs and eightof 40 Congress MPs had declared criminal cases against themselves in their affidavits.
The ADR analysis found that 203 of the 229 MPs or 89% of those analysed had declared assets over ₹1crore, including 90% of the BJP MPs, 93% of the Congress MPs, 100% of the AIADMK MPs and 69% of the Trinamool Congress MPs.
Highest declared assets
Janata Dal (United) MP from Bihar Mahendra Prasad had the highest declared assets at ₹4,078 crore, followed by YSRCP MP from Andhra Pradesh Alla Ayodhya Rami Reddy, who declared assets worth ₹2,577 crore, and actor-turned-politician, Samajwadi Party MP from Uttar Pradesh Jaya Bachchan who declared assets over ₹1,001 crore.
The ADR report said BJP MP from Manipur Maharaja Sanajaoba Leishemba declared ₹5.48 lakh in assets, the lowest of the MPs analysed, followed by Aam Aadmi Party MP from Delhi Sanjay Singh, who declared ₹6.60 lakh in assets, and BJP MP from Jharkhand Samir Oraon, who declared ₹18.69 lakh.
Party to rope in members from Valmiki and Gorkha community to counter opposition’s campaign.
Jammu: The J&K unit of the BJP has decided to celebrate the ‘first anniversary’ of abrogation of Article 370 and bi-furcation of the erstwhile state of J&K into two Union Territories in a big way.
The 15-day celebrations will be held from August 5 to 20 and during this period the party will organise various programmes across the UTs of J&K and Ladakh.
On Wednesday, a meeting of senior leaders was held in which the party decided to rope in people who were benefited by the abrogation of Article 370, especially Valmikis, Gorkhas and West Pakistani refugees.
The party has also decided that Tricolour would be hoisted on every roof-top of Jammu province.
Speaking on the occasion, party general secretary (organisation) Ashok Koul impressed upon all the BJP leaders to ensure that the ‘pakhwara’ would be celebrated like a festival in every nook and corner of the region. He discussed various programmes to be conducted during the whole ‘pakhwara’.
Koul asked the party leaders to ensure that the ‘Tiranga’ be grandly hoisted on every housetop of the region.
He said that to mark the important historical day a “virtual rally” will also be addressed by a Union Minister and asked the party leaders to ensure that it reaches every person owning a mobile phone or having Internet access.
The party has already appealed to all the citizens to illuminate their houses, chowks and prominent buildings in their areas with candles in the evening of August 5. (TNS)
Team based in China develop test that identifies cancers up to four years before signs appear
A blood test can pick up cancers up to four years before symptoms appear, researchers say, in the latest study to raise hopes of early detection.
A team led by researchers in China say the non-invasive blood test – called PanSeer – detects cancer in 95% of individuals who have no symptoms but later receive a diagnosis.
“We demonstrated that five types of cancer can be detected through a DNA methylation-based blood test up to four years before conventional diagnosis,” the team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
They said the test was unlikely to be predicting cancer but rather picking up on cancerous growths that had not yet caused symptoms or been spotted by other methods.
Such tests, known as liquid biopsies, have become the focus of much research as they offer a non-invasive way to screen patients.
The new study is not the first to report positive results for a blood test for early detection of cancer. However, the team said the research was exciting because it showed cancers could be detected before patients showed any indication of symptoms – something few studies have shown before.
The researchers reported how the new test was based on screening particular regions of DNA found in blood plasma for telltale tags, called methyl groups, that often crop up in tumour DNA. The team said they used techniques that allowed them to pick up even very small levels of such DNA.
They then used machine learning algorithms – a type of artificial intelligence – to develop a system that could determine whether any DNA found circulating in the blood was indeed shed by tumours, based on the presence of these methyl groups.
To develop the test, the team used blood plasma samples collected from individuals in China between 2007 and 2014 as part of a wider research endeavour.
Overall, 414 samples were used from participants who remained cancer-free at least five years after the blood was taken, and 191 samples were used from participants who were diagnosed with stomach, colorectal, liver, lung or oesophageal cancer within four years of the blood being collected. The team also used samples from biobanks from 223 patients already diagnosed with one of the five cancers.
After training the system on about half of the samples, the team tested their approach on the remainder.
The results revealed PanSeer flagged cancer in 88% of participants who had already been diagnosed and in 95% of participants who were not diagnosed with cancer but later went on to develop the disease. The test correctly identified those without cancer 96% of the time.
The study has limitations, including that it is based on a relatively small number of samples, storage was not optimal, and the team has raised some concerns about possible contamination. Also, the test cannot identify which type of cancer an individual has.
But Dr Eric Klein, of Cleveland Clinic’s Taussig Cancer Institute, who was part of a team that previously revealed a liquid biopsy that can identify 10 different types of cancer at an early stage and predict which organ is affected, welcomed the new research.
“This is an exciting study which provides further confirmation that methylation-based assays can detect cell-free circulating tumour DNA and may form the basis for new screening tests that detect cancer at early stages,” he said. “There is a need for such tests to screen for cancers for which there are currently are no effective screening paradigms.”
Samantha Harrison, a senior early diagnosis manager at Cancer Research UK, said: “The PanSeer test has achieved encouraging initial results. Promisingly, the test may be able to detect cancer in blood samples taken years before diagnosis. But these are early results that now need to be validated in larger studies.”
People line up behind a health care worker at a mobile Coronavirus testing site at the Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles (AP)