-Down to Earth Health experts blame Centre's over-emphasis on women's sterilisation for the Chhattisgarh tragedy THERE WAS nothing right about the sterilisation camp held on November 8 in Chhattisgarh's Takhatpur block of Bilaspur district. An overambitious government doctor-with unsterilised equipment and virtually no manpower-set out to conduct laparoscopic tubectomy on 83 women in an abandoned private hospital. The mass sterilisation led to the death of 13 women and left others critically ill. They were...

-The Indian Express The aftermath of the terrible deaths of women who underwent sterilisation surgeries in Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh has been full of stories about what actually happened. Spurious drugs and an overenthusiastic doctor who cut corners on ensuring quality vie for immediate blame. Beyond these, many have spoken about pervasive biases of gender and caste that wreak havoc on the lives of poor women, and also of family planning policies...

-The Hindu Tamil Nadu has come to realise in a most tragic manner the high mortality risk faced by preterm babies (those born before 37 completed weeks of gestation), and its unfinished task of saving these lives. Of the 13 neonates who died recently in district hospitals in Dharmapuri and Salem, five were preterm. Both preterm and low birth weight babies have died of the usual causes, such as respiratory...

-The Hindu The government must recognise the role low-cost health IT innovations could play in improving diagnostic accuracy, including many that would be useful for rural India The diagnosis of the first patient with Ebola in the U.S. was initially missed in an emergency room late night on September 25. Thomas Duncan, a Liberian national visiting Dallas, Texas, complained of flu-like symptoms and fever, but after lab work and CT scans, was...

-The Times of India CHENNAI: Poultry farmers can now afford to count their profits before their chickens hatch - and they are big, with chickens weighing on average twice as much as they did 50 years ago. The broiler chicken of today, a product of controlled breeding, weighs around 2.2kg as compared to 1.2kg before 1960, say veterinarians and chicken farm owners. Contract farming started in India in the early 1960s, taking...