The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) today issued new guidelines for malaria treatment, marking the first time the agency has released guidance on procuring safe and effective medicines to treat the disease. The agency warned that if not used properly, artemisinin-based combination therapy, known as ACTs, which have transformed treatment in recent years, could become ineffective. “The world now has the means to rapidly diagnose malaria and treat it...

Statistical poverty lines should not become real-life eligibility criteria for food entitlements.  Nothing is easier than to recognise a poor person when you see him or her. Yet the task of identifying and counting the poor seems to elude the country's best experts. Take for instance the “headcount” of rural poverty — the proportion of the rural population below the poverty line. At least four alternative figures are available: 28...

Ban forward trading of wheat and rice and undertake de-hoarding measures urgently Make higher budgetary allocations for Primary Health Centres which need to be strengthened Worst hit by the prices of essentials, women groups on Tuesday presented their wish-list for the budget to the Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee.“The spiralling rise in prices of essential commodities and inflation have had a particularly adverse impact on women, and on families from the more...

Smallholders and rural producers have a vital role to play in overcoming global hunger and poverty, and new and varied partnerships are needed, with particular emphasis on the interests of women, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today. “With more than 1 billion people now suffering from hunger, the highest number in human history, there is simply no time to lose,” he told the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized...

Gender-based disparities have shown a decline in the country in the last decade with the national capital scoring the highest, according to a report by the Ministry of Women and Child Development. There is an overall improvement in the performance on the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) over the decade, both in the all-India score and in the scores achieved by the States and Union Territories, the report titled “Gendering Human Development...