Current Affairs Question - 15 April 2020

Explanation :

• Established in February 2015 during the Ebola outbreak and modified in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the CCRT grants complement donor financing and the IMF concessional lending through the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT).
• The trust allows the IMF to join international debt relief efforts when poor countries are hit by the most catastrophic of natural disasters and to assist poor countries battling public health disasters—such as epidemics or global pandemics of infectious disease.

Eligibility

• Assistance through the CCRT is currently available to low-income countries eligible for concessional borrowing through the Poverty Reduction and Growth Trust (PRGT).
• Countries which have either a per capita income below the International Development Association’s (IDA) operational cutoff (currently US$1,175).
• Small states with a population below 1.5 million and a per capita income below twice the IDA cutoff (currently US$2,350).

Structure

The CCRT has two windows:

• Catastrophe Containment window, to provide assistance in containing a public health disaster
• Post-Catastrophe Relief window, to provide exceptional assistance in the wake of a catastrophic natural disaster.

Explanation :

• Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis, is a tropical parasitic disease caused by the protist Trypanosoma cruzi.
• It is spread mostly by insects known as Triatominae, or "kissing bugs".
• In the early stage, symptoms may include fever, swollen lymph nodes, headaches, or swelling at the site of the bite.

Mainly because of the increased population mobility in the last decades, most infected people live in urban settings (urbanization) and the disease has been increasingly detected in the United States of America, Canada, and many European and some African, Eastern Mediterranean and Western Pacific countries.