The Hindu Editorial Analysis- 25th January, 2022 | Current Affairs: Daily, Weekly & Monthly - CLAT PDF Download

1. In Conjunction Individual Obligation is Meaningful Only When Rights are Guaranteed by the State

Page 6/Editorial

GS 4- Ethics

Context:  Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought to suggest a dichotomy between the rights and duties of citizens when he said last week that the country had wasted a lot of time “fighting for rights” and “neglecting one’s duties”.

Importance of Rights

• The evolution of a democratic society is centred around the expansion of rights — civil, political, economic and cultural, leading to the empowerment of people.
• Democratic nations respect individual and group rights for moral and instrumental reasons.
• Duties, both legal and moral, are cherished in order to reinforce those rights. The obligations of the individual to the collective must be understood in that context; rights and duties complement each other, just as responsibility comes with freedom.
• Service and the sacrifices of nameless and faceless nation-builders have formed the bedrock of the modern Indian Republic, but their sacrifices were indeed for rights, dignity and autonomy.
• Any notion of rights and duties being adversarial or hierarchical is sophistic.

Expansion of Rights in India

• Fundamental rights: The Indian Constitution enshrines equality and freedom as fundamental rights, along with the right against exploitation, freedom of religion, cultural and educational rights, and the right to constitutional remedies.
• Legal rights: The deepening of Indian democracy has led to an expansion of rights — education, information, privacy, etc. are now legally guaranteed rights.
• The state’s fidelity to these rights is tenuous at best.

Duties of Citizens

Citizens are generally duty-bound to protect the integrity and the sovereignty of the country, and this is true for India though there is no conscription. Other constitutional duties expected include a duty to promote harmony and brotherhood, and to develop scientific temper, humanism and a spirit of inquiry.

Neglect of Rights in Favour of Duties

• Realization of rights is still a work in progress: Any shift in state policy emphasis from rights to duties will be absurd and a disservice to many for whom the realisation of even fundamental rights is still a work in progress.
• Rights necessary for nation's Critical progress: An enlightened citizenry is critical to progress and good governance.
• But duty is not something that the citizens owe to the state.
• The obligation of individual citizens to the collective pursuit of a nation can be meaningful when their rights are guaranteed by the state. The citizen has a right to use a public road, and a duty to obey traffic rules.
• The right and the duty are meaningful only in conjunction.

Conclusion
The Prime Minister’s comments come against this backdrop — formal and informal restrictions on the rights of citizens are on the rise along with coercive powers of the state. The emphasis on duty along with the de-emphasis of rights also raises the spectre of a descent into pre-Republican norms in social relations. The celebration of India as a traditionally duty-driven society carries with it the inescapable connotation of an exploitative division of labour and norms that are antithetical to constitutionalism. Needless to say, that is not progress.

2. The Challenge of Antimicrobial Resistance: What is the GRAM Report? How is Antimicrobial Resistance Affecting Global Health Practices?

Page/Text and Context - I

GS 3- Science & Tech, GS 2- Health

Context: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), or antibiotics becoming ineffective because pathogens such as viruses, fungi and bacteria become resistant to them, has long been recognised as a major threat to public health.

However, there are only few estimates on the scale of the problem and regional variations. Based on estimates from 204 countries and territories, the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) report published in The Lancet on Thursday provides the most comprehensive estimate of the global impact of AMR so far.

The GRAM Report

• Its headline finding is that as many as 4.95 million deaths may be associated with bacterial AMR in 2019.
• Estimates included in the paper show that AMR is a leading cause of death globally, higher than HIV/AIDS or malaria.

Region-Wise:

• In South Asia, over 3,89,000 people died as a direct result of AMR in 2019.
• The death rate was the highest in Western sub-Saharan Africa, at 27.3 deaths per 1,00,000 and lowest in Australasia, at 6.5 deaths per 1,00,000.
• Lower respiratory tract infections accounted for more than 1.5 million deaths associated with resistance in 2019, making it the most common infectious syndrome.
• The six leading pathogens for deaths associated with resistance were Escherichia coli, followed by Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
• They were responsible for 3.57 million deaths associated with AMR in 2019. One pathogen–drug combination, meticillin-resistant S aureus, caused more than 1,00,000 deaths attributable to AMR in 2019, while six more each caused 50,000 -100,000 deaths.

How was this study done?

• GRAM is led out of the University of Oxford Big Data Institute —IHME Strategic Partnership.
• IHME is the Institute for Health Metrics. The research paper lists a large number of contributors from across the world who provide data from multiple sources, including microbiology data, inpatient data, data on multiple causes of death, and pharmaceutical sales data.
• The data was then broken down, by region, into deaths in which infection played a role by infectious syndrome; pathogen distribution for deaths and incident cases; incidence of infectious syndromes disaggregated by age, sex, and location; prevalence of resistance by pathogen; relative risk of death for drug-resistant infection compared with drug-sensitive infections; and finally, computing the burden attributable to drug resistance and burden associated with drug-resistant infections.

What are the implications of this study?

• Common infections such as lower respiratory tract infections, bloodstream infections, and intra-abdominal infections are now killing hundreds of thousands of people every year because bacteria have become resistant to treatment.
• This includes historically treatable illnesses, such as pneumonia, hospital-acquired infections, and foodborne ailments.
• Everyone is at risk from AMR, but the data show that young children are particularly affected.
• In 2019, one in five global deaths attributable to AMR occurred in children under the age of five —often from previously treatable infections.
• AMR is threatening the ability of hospitals to keep patients safe from infections and undermining the ability of doctors to carry out essential medical practice safely, including surgery, childbirth and cancer treatment since infection is a risk following these procedures.
• Between 1980 and 2000, 63 new antibiotics were approved for clinical use. Between 2000 and 2018, just 15 additional antibiotics were approved.
• Out of the seven deadliest drug-resistant bacteria, vaccines are only available for two (Streptococcus pneumoniae and Mycobacterium tuberculosis). Whilst all seven of the leading bacteria have been identified as ‘priority pathogens’ by the WHO, only two have been a focus of major global health intervention programmes —S. pneumoniae (primarily through pneumococcal vaccination) and M. tuberculosis.

Way Forward

• Greater action to monitor and control infections, globally, nationally and within individual hospitals. Access to vaccines, clean water and sanitation ought to be expanded.
• The use of antibiotics unrelated to treating human disease, such as in food and animal production, must be “optimised”.
• Being “more thoughtful” about our use of antimicrobial treatments —expanding access to lifesaving antibiotics where needed, minimising use where they are not necessary to improve human health and acting according to WHO’s recommendations on the same.
• Developing new antimicrobials and targeting priority pathogens such as K. pneumoniae and E. Coli and ensuring that they are affordable and accessible to most of the world.