Current Affairs: Other Issues 10 to 18 August 2010

CAG Weekly
(Current Affairs & GK)
By Om Prakash (Goldy sir)

Other Issues

Endangered languages

  • A language dies every 14 days, and half those spoken today are expected to vanish by 2100. The secret language of the Kallawaya, in central South America, is over 400 years old and spoken by fewer than a hundred people.
  • In daily life the Kallawaya use Spanish or Aymara but when discussing medicinal plants, used in their role as healers, they speak their own private language.
  • l Aboriginal Australia holds some of the most endangered languages such as Amurdag, which was believed extinct until a few years ago when linguists came across Charlie Mangulda living in the Northern Territory.
  • l Mednyj Aleut is spoken by a handful of people in eastern Siberia. Unlike most languages it has two parents, a combination of largely Aleut vocabulary and Russian verb endings.
  • l Siletz Dee—ni is spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon. When the reservation was created in 1855 it held speakers of many languages. To communicate with each other residents adopted a pidgin version of Chinook, in the process nearly wiping out their indigenous languages.
  • l There are five first-language speakers of Euchee, an American Indian language, all over 80. The language went into decline in the 1900s when punishments were introduced for American Indian students heard speaking their own languages at school.
  • l Nivkh, a Siberian language spoken by fewer than 300 people, has 26 different ways of saying every number depending on what the speaker is counting.

Superbug: Not the end of antibiotics

  • Recently Lancent (a reputed journal which publishes medical research papers and articles) has published a report which says that scientists tracked down to Indian hospitals a drug-resistant superbug that infects patients and causes multiple-organ failure. The study has warned that people travelling to the country to get cheaper medical treatment including cosmetic surgeries risked picking up the superbug, called NDM-1.
  • With the discovery of NDM-1 (New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase) gene in gut bacteria in patients treated in some hospitals, obituaries are being written on antibiotics. But, is the scare really necessary?
  • Is not the first time that obituaries for antibiotics are written.16 years ago -- in March 1994 to be precise -- Newsweek magazine raised the issue based on the warning issued by microbiologist Alexander Tomasz that many common bacteria are evolving resistance to more and more antibiotics.
  • If antibiotics resistance becomes widespread, definitely human ingenuity will once again ensure that enabling environment is provided to experts to find the necessary cure.
  • Phage therapy is one of the most promising cures around the corner. Phages, the virus that kill harmful bacteria, is one such cure and numerous research groups that are working quietly in the background will get the fillip soon, just like the lease of life that biofuels got due to the alarming price increase in fossil fuels.