Jharkhand has decided to seriously monitor deaths of mothers, during child delivery or as a result of extraneous circumstances, having woken up to its dismal health record that is nowhere near the UN’s millennium goals. Jharkhand’s maternal mortality rate or MMR — the number of maternal deaths per one lakh live births in a year — stands at 371, while the national average is 312. But as a signatory to...

If climate change is indeed the biggest global health threat, public health professionals say that women and children in developing countries will be hit hardest. Research has shown that deep inequalities make them the most vulnerable to scarcity and disease when community sources start to shrink. “Malnutrition poses the biggest threat to children,” paediatrics professor Louis Reynolds said. “If temperature rises by 3 degrees centigrade, deaths from malnutrition will go up by...

The poor health indices and health care in rural India have always been met with lofty ideals sans action; they demand urgent and radical solutions.  The recent proposal to introduce a new medical course, Bachelor of Rural Health Care, has been met with resistance from many sections of the medical fraternity. Its opponents argue that it will result in second-class health care for rural India and increase the rural-urban divide....

A recent survey carried out by the TNUEF brings to light details of the discrimination Dalits in Madurai have faced for generations. OVER seven decades have rolled by since the freedom fighter A. Vaidhyanatha Iyer successfully led Dalits into the Meenakshi temple in Madurai, overcoming all the impediments posed by the casteist forces that were hell-bent on thwarting the historic event. But the stark reality is that “hidden apartheid” against...

Defending the alternative model for undergraduate medical education to create a separate cadre of “rural doctors,” Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Thursday that the scheme would not compromise with the quality of medical education or reduce the importance of trained and specialised doctors. Inaugurating a two-day national workshop here to discuss the programme for starting a specialised course of Bachelor of Rural Medicine and...