Context: India’s space program has attained new heights in the last decade. This article looks at the evolution of the space sector in the last fifty years, with special focus on the last decade.
Seeding phase (1970-90s):
This period starts with the launch of sounding rockets in the 1970s to the development of PSLV rocket in the early 1990s. Development of PSLV rocket was the only badge of honour during this phase.
PSLV: PSLV has been labelled as the 'workhorse' of ISRO. PSLV is an indigenously developed rocket which can carry payloads up to 3.25 tonne to low earth orbit or 1.75 tonne to geostationary transfer orbit (36,000 km above the earth).
Flowering Phase (1990-2010s):
GSLV: In 2001, India launched its first heavy rocket called the GSLV, with a Russian upper-stage cryogenic engine. After the initial hiccups, this rocket attained maturity.
Chandrayaan-1: India's first moon mission developed by ISRO known as Chandrayaan-1 was a great success which reached the surface of moon and even discovered the presence of water on moon's surface.
Mangalyaan: India became the first country to successfully launch a spacecraft to the Mars Orbit in the first attempt, a feat which no country could achieve.
Fruiting phase (2014-24)
Chandrayaan-3's successful moon landing. This made India only the fourth country in the world to successfully land on moon after the US, Russia and China. (Note. Japan has also successfully landed on the moon's surface).
Aditya L-1 mission placing a space observatory precisely at L-1 point between sun and the Earth. The Aditya L-1 mission is placed 1.5 million km from earth, from where it would constantly observe the sun. India was the fourth country in the world to do so after the US, Europe and China.
Deployment of NaVIC: India has successfully developed and deployed its own regional navigation satellite system, which is a regional version of the USA's Global Positioning System (GPS). Only the USA (GPS), Europe (Galileo), Russia (Glonass) and China (Beidou) has their own global positioning systems, while Japan (Michibiki also known as Quasi Zenith Satellite System).
New Launch Vehicles: ISRO has successfully developed other rockets - a heavier LVM-3 (GSLV Mk III) and a smaller capacity Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) for smaller payloads, which will cater to the large market for small satellite launch vehicles.
Anti-Satellite Capability: In March 2019, India demonstrated its anti-satellite capability which displayed the capacity to chase and hit a defunct Indian satellite in the low-earth orbit. India was only the fourth country to demonstrate this capability after US, Russia and China.
Defence capability: A positive rub-off effect of India's successful space technology has enabled India to develop a bunch of inter-continental ballistic missile that fly to space and come back. These satellites has used technologies which were earlier developed for India's space program.
Pathbreaking policy of allowing private sector participation in space.
Challenges faced by ISRO
Technology denial by developed countries such as Cryogenic engine technology under the technology denial regimes.
Delays in continuing in missions and projects such as Gaganyaan and NISAR launch.
Failure to develop new rockets such as semi-cryo engines, electric propulsion etc.
Limited bandwidth to take up multiple missions under both commercial and scientific buckets.
Future of India's Space Program
Future of India's Space Program
Gaganyaan Mission: Sending two or three Indians to space and bring them back.
Sukrayaan Mission: Missions to explore Venus
An Asteroid Mission but for this the timeline has not been replaced.
Chandrayaan series: Plans to send a robotic and manned missions to the moon.
Bharat Antariksh Station: Build and deploy an Indian space station.
Global Collaborations with advanced space faring nations
Increasingly, advanced industrial and space faring countries are willing to collaborate with India over space issues.
NISAR Satellite: Collaboration of NASA & ISRO. NISAR stands for NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar which aims to provide an unprecedented view of the earth.
TRISHNA Satellite: Collaboration between ISRO and French Space Agency CNES. TRISHNA stands for Thermal InfraRed Imaging Satellite for High-resolution Natural resource Assessment. TRISHAN will be deployed for use in climate monitoring and operational applications.
Private Participation in Space Sector
India opened its space sector to private participation. Initiatives taken in this regard are:
Creation of IN-SPACe: IN-SPACe stands for Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre which aims to act as independent space regulator. IN-SPACe has re- ceived about 500 applications for authorisation and has signed over 50 technology transfer agreements.
Unveiling of Indian Space Policy 2023: Earlier, scope of private participation in India's space sector was limited to making small components and equipment's to be used by ISRO. However, the policy and rules under it, expanded the scope of private participation in the space sector providing a broad framework for non-government entities participation in areas like space vehicles, satellites, dissemination of data and setting up ground stations.
Space-startups: There are currently more than 400 private sector space startups in the country, which together have committed to invest $330 million in the space sector.
New spaceport at Kulasekarapatnam: ISRO is building a new spaceport for small rockets launches at Kulasekarapatnam in Tamil Nadu. This spaceport will be principally used by private sector players with assistance from ISRO.
MRI is an indispensable tool to look inside the human body without surgery. It is used to obtain images of soft tissues within the body. Soft tissue is any tissue that has not become harder through calcification.
It is a non-invasive diagnostic procedure widely used to image the brain, the cardiovascular system, the spinal cord and joints, various muscles, the liver, arteries, etc.
MRI scans do not pose any threats; once the magnetic fields are taken away, the atoms in the scanned part do not remain affected. There is no long-term harm associated with scans.
Applications:
Brain imaging: MRI can help identify abnormalities such as tumours and track neurological conditionsincluding Alzheimer’s, dementia, epilepsy, and stroke etc. Functional MRI (fMRI) is a specialised technique that measures brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, providing insights into brain function and mapping brain networks.
Cardiovascular imaging: MRI can produce detailed images of the heart and blood vessels without using ionising radiation. It helps diagnose heart conditions such as coronary artery disease, cardiac tumours, and congenital heart defects.
Spinal cord imaging: MRI is effective in visualising the spinal cord and various structures like joints, ligaments, tendons, and muscles.
Abdominal and pelvic imaging: MRI is used to examine abdominal and pelvic organs, including the liver, pancreas, kidneys, uterus, ovaries, and prostate. It can detect tumours, cysts, infections, and other abnormalities, and it is often employed when other imaging methods like ultrasound or computed tomography (CT) provide inconclusive results.
Cancer detection: Its use is particularly important in the observation and treatment of certain cancers, including prostate and rectal cancer.
How does MRI work?
An MRI procedure reveals an image of a body part using the hydrogen atoms in that part. A hydrogen atom is simply one proton with one electron around it. These atoms are all spinning, with axes pointing in random directions. Hydrogen atoms are abundant in fat and water, which are present almost throughout the body.
The MRI machine itself looks like a giant doughnut. The hole in the centre, called the bore, is where the person whose body is to be scanned is inserted. Inside the doughnut is a powerful superconducting magnet whose job is to produce a powerful and stable magnetic field around the body. Once the body part to be scanned is at the centre of the bore, the magnetic field is switched on.
Each hydrogen atom has a powerful magnetic moment, which means in the presence of a magnetic field, the atom’s spin axis will point along the field’s direction. The superconducting magnet applies a magnetic field down the centre of the machine, such that the axes of roughly half of the hydrogen atoms in the part to be scanned are pointing one way and the other half are pointing the other way. This matching is almost exact: in around a million atoms, only a handful remain unmatched — that is, a small population of ‘excess’ atoms pointing one way or the other.
The machine has a device that emits a radiofrequency pulse at the part under the scanner. When the pulse is ‘on’, only the small population of ‘excess’ atoms absorbs the radiation and gets excited. When the pulse goes ‘off’, these atoms emit the absorbed energy and return to their original, lower energy states.
Finally, a detector receives the emissions and converts them to signals, which are sent to a computer that uses them to recreate two- or three-dimensional images of that part of the body.
Limitations:
Because of the MRI technique’s use of strong magnetic fields, individuals with embedded metallic objects (like shrapnel) and metallic implants, including pacemakers, may not be able to undergo MRI scans.
MRI machines are expensive: Depending on the specifications, including the strength of the magnetic fields and the imaging quality, they cost from a few tens of lakh rupees to a few crores. Diagnostic facilities pass this cost on to its patients. Based on the clinical requirements, scans often cost ₹10,000 or more each — a sizable sum in India.
Discomfort: Inside the machine, the individual is expected to lie still for tens of minutes, until the scan is complete. If the individual moves, the resulting image will be distorted and the scan will have to be repeated. The problem is exacerbated if the individual is claustrophobic (although some ‘open-bore’ MRI machine designs can alleviate this issue).
Context:The Kerala government issued an alert in the State against West Nile fever, a mosquito-borne viral infection, after one death and eight cases were reported in recent days.
About West Nile Virus:
It is a flavivirus associated to the viruses that are also responsible for causing St. Louis encephalitis, Japanese encephalitis, and yellow fever.
It is a single-stranded RNA virus and is spread by the Culex species of mosquitoes.
It was first isolated in a woman in the West Nile district of Uganda in 1937. It was identified in birds in the Nile delta region in 1953.
Along all major bird migratory routes, WNV outbreak sites are found: Africa, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and West Asia.
No vaccine for WNV is available. Only supportive treatments can be provided to neuroinvasive WNV patients.
Transmission:
Principal vector is the culex species of mosquitoes.
Birds act as the reservoir host of the virus.
Infected mosquitoes transmit WNV between and among humans and animals, including birds.
WNV can also get transmitted from an infected mother to her child through blood transfusion.
A very small proportion of human infections have occurred through organ transplant, blood transfusions and breast milk. There is one reported case of transplacental (mother-to-child) WNV transmission.
No instance of transmission by contact with infected humans or animals has been reported.
It does not spread ‘through eating infected animals, including birds.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), no human-to-human transmission of WNV through casual contact has been reported till date.
Symptoms:
Symptoms of the infection include high fever, headache, disorientation, stupor, coma, tremors, convulsions, muscle weakness, and paralysis.
Most of the symptoms are similar to that of Japanese encephalitis.
However, 80% of the patients need not show any symptoms.
Severe infection may even cause neurological diseases like West Nile encephalitis or meningitis or West Nile poliomyelitis or acute flaccid paralysis.
There are reports of WNV-associated Guillain-Barré syndrome and radiculopathy.
The Flaviviridae are a family of positive, single-stranded, enveloped RNA viruses.
They are found in arthropods, (primarily ticks and mosquitoes), and can occasionally infect humans.
Members of this family belong to a single genus, Flavivirus, and cause widespread morbidity and mortality throughout the world.
Some of the mosquitoes-transmitted viruses include: Yellow Fever, Dengue Fever, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile viruses, and Zika virus.
Other Flaviviruses are transmitted by ticks and are responsible of encephalitis and haemorrhagic diseases: Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) and Alkhurma disease.
Context: The Eta Aquariid meteor shower, which has been active since April 15, will peak on May 5 and 6. These showers are seen in May every year, and are best visible to countries such as Indonesia and Australia in the Southern Hemisphere.
Comets:
Comets are frozen leftovers from the formation of our solar system, some 4.6 billion years ago.
Comets are composed of dust, rock and ice, and orbit around the Sun in highly elliptical orbits which can, in some cases, take hundreds of thousands of years to complete.
According to NASA, a total of 3,910 comets are currently known, although billions more are theorised to be orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune, in the Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort cloud.
Comets come in different sizes, although most are roughly 10 km wide. However, as they come closer to the Sun, comets heat up and spew gasesand dust into a glowing head that can be larger than a planet. This material also forms a tail which stretches millions of miles.
Asteroids:
Asteroids are rocky remnants from the early formation of our solar system (about 4.6 billion years ago) that mainly orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter.
The asteroid belt is a nearly flat ring that contains millions of asteroids, ranging in size from less than 10 metres to 530 kms (The largest asteroid is Ceres, which is about one-quarter the size of Earth’s moon).
Meteoroids, Meteors and Meteorites:
Meteoroids are rocky fragments of asteroids, comets, moons, and planetary collisions. They are much smaller than asteroids, ranging in size from tiny grains up to a metre. In our solar system, most meteoroids come from the asteroid belt, but a few come from comets and fragments of the Moon and Mars formed by impacts.
Meteor is a flash of light (shooting star or falling star) seen when a meteoroid, asteroid, or comet heats up in the Earth’s atmosphere. Since most meteors are tiny (the size of a grain of sand) they completely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. This burning also creates a brief tail.
Meteorites are meteoroids that enter the Earth’s atmosphere and survive to impact the Earth’s surface. A large enough meteor can pass through the atmosphere and hit the Earth’s ground, often causing significant damage.
Eta Aquariid meteor shower:
The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is formed when Earth passes through the orbital plane of the famous Halley’s Comet, which takes about 76 years to orbit the Sun once.
Last seen in 1986, Halley’s comet is due to enter the inner solar system again in 2061.
Like Eta Aquariids, the Orionids meteor shower is also caused by the Halley’s Comet, and appears every October.
The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is known for its rapid speed. This makes for long, glowing tails which can last up to several minutes. The meteor shower consists of burning space debris moving at speeds of around 66 km per second (2.37 lakh kmph) into Earth’s atmosphere.
Southern Hemisphere: a better vantage point:
The difference in meteor rates between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres during the Eta Aquarid meteor shower is primarily due to the position of this radiant point relative to each hemisphere.
The radiant point of the Eta Aquarids (apparent origin of the meteors) is located near the star Eta Aquarii in the Aquarius constellation (in the southern part of the sky).
From the Southern Hemisphere, this radiant is higher above the horizon, which means meteors appear to streak outwards in different directions and are more spread out across the sky.
From the Northern Hemisphere, the radiant point of the Eta Aquarids is much closer to the horizon. This positioning causes the meteors to skim the Earth's atmosphere at a shallower angle. Consequently, they may appear as "Earthgrazers," which are long, slow-moving meteors that appear to skim or graze the surface of the Earth.
Consequently, In the Southern Hemisphere, where the radiant is higher in the sky, observers can see more meteors per hour during the peak of the shower (around 30 to 40 meteors per hour). Conversely, in the Northern Hemisphere, with the radiant nearer to the horizon, observers typically see fewer meteors (around 10 per hour) and often in the form of Earthgrazers.
Context: The Delhi High Court has ordered the Department of Drugs Control in Delhi to check weekly and make sure that any cases of fake Oxytocin being used or held are officially recorded under Section 12 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, and Section 18(a) of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940.
About Oxytocin:
It is also known as the ‘love hormone’ or bonding hormone, is a hormone produced in the hypothalamus and secreted by the pituitary glands of mammals during sex, childbirth, lactation or social bonding.
It acts both as a hormone and as a brain neurotransmitter. In the brain, where it acts as a neurotransmitter, oxytocin is involved in a variety of social behaviours, bonding, and emotional responses.
It helps contract the uterus and induce delivery, control bleeding, and promote the release of breast milk. Its use is especially crucial to prevent new mothers from excessively bleeding after giving birth, a common cause of maternal deaths.
It can also be chemically manufactured and is sold by pharma companies for use during childbirth. It is administered either as an injection or a nasal solution.
It was banned in April 2018, saying that it was being misused on milch cattle to increase yield, which not only affects the health of the cattle but also humans who consumed the milk.
It is also used to increase the size of vegetables such as pumpkins, watermelons, eggplants, gourds, and cucumbers.
A ‘standard’ is a set of technical requirements or agreed technical descriptions which cover ideas, products or services and make sure that technologies interact and work together.
A Standard Essential Patent (SEP) is a patent granted for technological invention which is essential for implementation and working of a standard.
Patents which are essential to a standard and have been adopted by a Standard Setting Organisation (SSO) are known as SEPs.
SSOs are either governmental, quasi-governmental or private groups of independently governed industry associations.
SSOs set, develop, coordinate, interpret, and maintain standards. Industry participants can collaborate on a single technical solution because of such standards.
When a patent is acknowledged by the SSO and designated as a SEP, manufacturers can only produce their goods in the market after first acquiring a licence under the SEP.
SEPs and the Telecommunications Sector:
SEPs are widely used in the telecommunications sector as it is a highly standardised industry primarily driven by the requirement for interoperabilitybetween communication devices.
Technologies such as CDMA, GSM, LTE are all industry standards in the telecom sector. Such technological standards are especially important to ensure interoperability of different brands of cellular phones manufactured by different companies.
For example, once GSM was adopted as a standard, all manufacturers had to ensure that the handsets that they manufactured were compatible with GSM. Otherwise there would be no demand for their phones.
In industries like consumer electronics, the automotive industry, and the electricity grid industry, such communication standards are also essential for the growth of the hyperconnected society.
The goal of making standards accessible to everyone for public use may be defeated by the exclusive rights granted to inventors by patents. To address this issue, the majority of SSOs have established IPR policies that require SSO members to agree to licensing their SEPs under "Fair, Reasonable and Nondiscriminatory" (FRAND) terms and conditions.
These commitments are intended to safeguard technology implementers while making sure that Patent holders are fairly compensated for their research and development expenditures.
SEP protection in India:
The Patent laws in India neither contain a special provision for SEPs nor lays down any specific criteria or terms and conditions to be complied with while licensing a patented technology. However, it does restrain a patentee (proprietor of the patent) from abusing its patent right and engaging in practices that unreasonably restrain trade.
Moreover, the Indian judiciary has been framing laws through court cases for the regulation of the SEPs.
Through its National Telecom Policy (2012), India has aimed to increase standardisation and intellectual property creation. India’s national SSO is the Bureau of Indian Standards.
FRAND licensing (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory):
The Judiciary and the Standard Setting Organisations have mandated licensing of the patents based on FAIR, REASONABLE and NON-DISCRIMINATORY (FRAND) principles.
FRAND terms encourage the adoption of the standard and mitigate any concerns about unfair competition.
SEPs can be protected in India only by registering a patent in India. A SEP holder must agree to licence the SEP to willing licensees at Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) rates.
Challenges:
Globally, the process of setting standards in the technology sector is largely privatised and dominated by “standard setting organisations” (SSOs) run largely by private technology companies. Countries such as India with little innovation in the telecom sector, have very little influence over how standards are set or how SEPs are licensed.
Theoretically, the companies which own the SEPs, gain enormously because every manufacturer of cellular phones has to licence the technological standards in question in order to survive in the market. The lack of alternatives also means that owners of SEPs can demand extortionary royalties or licensing terms from manufacturers that block competition.
In theory, the SSOs are supposed to prevent such a scenario by requiring the owners of SEPs to licence their technologies at a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rate. In practice, this model of self-regulation by the technology industry has been marked with opacity.
Way Forward:
On the lines of international agreements, the Indian government needs to intervene and put in place the measures to regulate standard essential patents for greater transparency and protect the rights of Indian manufacturers.
Context: India is in talks with large domestic companies to invest in the regulated nuclear sector, including promoting clean power through generation of pink hydrogen.
Present Status:
Restricted Private Ownership: The Atomic Energy Act, 1962 restricts private companies from owning and operating nuclear power plants in India.
Central Government Control: The central government, currently through public sector corporations like Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL), holds the authority for activities related to nuclear energy, including its production, development, use, and disposal.
Amended Act (2015): The 2015 amendment to the Atomic Energy Act, allows NPCIL to form joint ventures with other public sector units to secure funding for new projects. However, this does not extend to private or foreign companies.
Private Sector Participation: Currently, private companies can participate in specific areas like supplying components and reactors, but not owning or operating plants.
Future Considerations: Discussions are ongoing about allowing more private sector involvement, potentially through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs). This would likely require further amendments to the Act.
Types of Hydrogen:
Hydrogen can be produced from a variety of resources, such as natural gas, nuclear power, biomass, and renewable power like solar and wind.
Hydrogen is an invisible gas. Depending on the type of production used, different colour names are assigned to the hydrogen.
Some common types of Hydrogen:
Grey hydrogen: Grey hydrogen is produced using fossil fuels such as natural gas or coal. Grey hydrogen accounts for roughly 95% of the hydrogen produced in the world today.
The two main production methods are steam methane reforming and coal gasification. Both of these processes release carbon dioxide (CO2).
If the carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, then the hydrogen produced is referred to as grey hydrogen.
Blue Hydrogen: Blue hydrogen is similar to grey hydrogen, except that most of the CO2 emissions are sequestered (stored in the ground) using carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Capturing and storing the carbon dioxide instead of releasing it into the atmosphere allows blue hydrogen to be a low-carbon fuel.
Blue hydrogen is a cleaner alternative to grey hydrogen but is expensive since carbon capture technology is used.
Green Hydrogen: Green hydrogen is hydrogen produced using electricity from clean energy sources, such as wind and solar energy, which do not release greenhouse gases when generating electricity.
Green hydrogen is made when water (H2O) is split into hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2) via a process known as electrolysis.
Pink Hydrogen: Pink hydrogen is produced through electrolysis of water but using energy from nuclear power, which does not produce any carbon dioxide emissions.
Pink hydrogen facilities can achieve a high-capacity factor due to the steady base-load profile of nuclear power (involving both stability and density), as compared to the intermittent supply from renewable sources (solar, wind).
Turquoise Hydrogen: Turquoise hydrogen is made using a process called methane pyrolysis. In this process methane is split into hydrogen and solid carbon with heating in reactors or blast furnaces.
Context: The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) tested a next-generation Supersonic Missile-Assisted Release of Torpedo (SMART) system aimed at boosting the Navy’s anti-submarine warfare capabilities.
About Supersonic Missile-Assisted Release of Torpedo (SMART) system:
It is a missile-based system designed to significantly extend the range of lightweight torpedoes that can target submarines hundreds of kilometres away far beyond the conventional range of lightweight torpedoes (around 20-40 km).
It will be particularly employed in the absence of other assets for immediate action when an enemy submarine is detected.
The canister-based missile system comprises several advanced subsystems including two-stage solid propulsion, precision inertial navigation, and a precision inertial navigation system, among others.
It carries an advanced lightweight torpedo missile as a payload along with a parachute-based release mechanism.
The system has been designed to enhance anti-submarine warfare capability far beyond the conventional range of the torpedo.
Context: Microsoft unveiled the latest version of its lightweight Al model, the Phi-3-mini, reportedly the first among three small language models (SLMs) that the company plans to release.
More about news:
Phi-3-mini has 3.8 billion parameters (a measure of the size and complexity of an Al model) and is trained on a data set that is smaller in comparison to LLMs such as Open Al's GPT-4.
The amount of conversation that an AI can read and write at any given time is called the context window and is measured in tokens.
It is the first model in its class to support a context window which helps an Al model recall information during a session of up to 128,000 tokens, with little impact on quality. A token is the fundamental unit of data used by a language model to process and generate text.
Phi-3-mini requires less computational power and has much better latency.
About Small language models (SLMs):
SLMs are compact versions of large language models (LLMS), which can comprehend and generate human language text.
The new model expands the selection of high-quality models for customers, offering more practical choices as they build generative Al applications.
It is more streamlined versions of large language models. When compared to LLMs, smaller AI models are also cost-effective to develop and operate, and they perform better on smaller devices like laptops and smartphones.
LLMs are trained on massive general data, while SLMs stand out with their specialisation. Through fine-tuning, SLMs can be customised for specific tasks - achieving accuracy and efficiency in the process. Most SLMs undergo targeted training, which demands considerably less computing power and energy compared to LLMs.
SLMs also differ from LLMs with reference to inference latency, which is the time taken for a model to make predictions or decisions after receiving input.
Their compact size allows for quicker processing, making them more responsive and apt for real-time applications such as virtual assistants and chat-bots and their cost makes them appealing to smaller organisations and research groups.
SLMs are highly versatile, useful in applications ranging from sentiment analysis to code generation. Their compact size and efficient computation also make them ideal for use on edge devices and in resource-limited settings.
Most popular SLMs: Llama 2 developed by Meta AI, Mistral and Mixtral, Microsoft’s Phi and Orca, Alpaca 7B and StableLM.
Context: Various countries, including the US and European Union, have found microbiological contamination (i.e. Salmonella contamination) and high amounts of ethylene oxide (a pesticide) in spices originating from India being exported to the countries.
Salmonella contamination:
Salmonella is a rod-shaped gram-negative bacteria which commonly causes food poisoning.
It can be found in a variety of foods, including raw or undercooked meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy products, as well as fruits, vegetables, and processed foods.
Contamination usually occurs when food comes into contact with faecal matter from infected animals or humans. This can happen due to lack of sanitary practices during the production, processing, or handling of food products and spices.
Consuming food contaminated with Salmonella can lead to symptoms such as diarrhoea, abdominal cramps, fever, nausea, and vomiting.
Ethylene oxide contamination:
Ethylene oxide contamination in Indian products mainly originates from the agricultural and food processing sectors. The chemical is often used as a sterilising agent to reduce microbial load in spices, dried vegetable products, and other food commodities susceptible to bacterial contamination during processing and storage.
While ethylene oxide effectively kills bacteria, fungi, and insects, its use as a fumigant in food products is regulated due to its carcinogenic nature. Improper use or excessive application in the food supply chain, particularly in the spice industry, where hygiene standards require strict microbial control, has led to significant contamination issues.
Impact of Ethylene oxide on public health:
Carcinogenic properties: Ethylene oxide is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), meaning it has proven carcinogenic effects on humans. Chronic exposure, even at low levels, can increase the risk of lymphoid cancer and breast cancer.
Long-term exposure risks: The primary health concern with ethylene oxide in food products is the potential for long-term exposure. Consuming contaminated foods over extended periods can lead to cumulative exposure, which significantly raises cancer risk among populations.
Way Forward:
Regulatory measures: Indian regulatory authorities, such as the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), need to implement stringent monitoring mechanisms to detect and control ethylene oxide use. Regular testing of food products for ethylene oxide residues can help ensure compliance with safety standards.
Training and education programs: There should be comprehensive training and education programs for producers and exporters on the dangers of ethylene oxide and the importance of adhering to safe usage practices.
Align with international safety regulations: Engaging with international food safety agencies to align safety regulations and standards can help reduce the rejection rates of Indian exports and build trust in Indian food products globally.
Explore alternativesin food processing: Exploring safer chemical alternatives that have similar antimicrobial properties without carcinogenic risks is crucial. Substances such as ozone, hydrogen peroxide, or heat treatments could serve as potential replacements for ethylene oxide in certain applications.
Good manufacturing practices and technology use: Enhancing overall hygiene and storage conditions in the production process can reduce the need for chemical sterilants. Implementing Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP) systems can significantly mitigate microbial contamination risks. Technologies like cold plasma, pulsed light sterilisation, and high-pressure processing are innovative non-chemical methods that can effectively reduce microbial load without leaving harmful residues.
Context: The rising incidence of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) across the globe has become a concern for doctors.
About Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD):
It is the common name used to describe two chronic diseases of the intestinal tract: Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis that cause inflammation in the intestines.
Crohn’s disease can affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract from the mouth to the anusbut most commonly affects the end of the small intestine (the ileum) and the beginning of the colon.
Ulcerative colitis can affect any part of the large intestine.
Both diseases involve chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, which can lead to a variety of abdominal pain, cramping, and diarrhea.
IBD is an autoimmune disorder, meaning the body’s immune system attacks healthy tissues. It is not yet known what triggers these attacks and why IBD develops in some people and not in others even the exact cause of IBD is not known, but it is believed to result from a complex interplay of genetic, environmental, and immune factors.
Diagnosis typically involves a combination of endoscopic procedures (such as colonoscopy), imaging studies, and biopsies, along with blood and stool tests to confirm inflammation and rule out infections.
There is no cure for IBD, but there are treatments that can help to control the inflammation and improve symptoms. Treatment for IBD may include medication, diet therapy such as curd and buttermilk, and less milk, more rice and millets, fruits, and vegetables.
