Poisonous snakebites have killed more than a million Indians in the last two decades, finds a recently published article entitled Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study. Published in the open access journal elifesciences.org, the research-based study has found that the country accounts for nearly half the total number of annual deaths in the world caused by snakebite envenoming. Who are the...

-The Hindu Even as COVID-19 cases and deaths are rapidly rising in the capital, the AAP government is grappling with complaints of under-reporting, inadequate facilities and exploitative private hospitals. Nikhil M. Babu reports on how it frittered away an opportunity to ramp up healthcare facilities during the lockdown period On February 29 afternoon, when 45-year-old Rohit Dutta walked into the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in New Delhi to take a COVID-19 test,...

-The Hindu The lockdown period saw the state abdicating its responsibilities towards the welfare of pregnant women In a shocking incident earlier this month, a pregnant woman died in an ambulance in Noida after being turned away from a number of private and Government Hospitals. This raises a chilling question for all of us: if this can happen somewhere so close to the nation’s capital, what is happening in the corners of...

-The Indian Express One of the obvious reasons why public healthcare has not been a priority for successive governments of India lies in the fact that India’s middle class did not need it. As epidemiologists tend to consider that the peak of the COVID-19 epidemic may not come before July, the question of the resilience of the Indian health system becomes more pressing, especially in cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad. The...

-The Hindu Central government facilities are open to all. As complaints mounted on social media of poor treatment at Delhi’s hospitals, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced on Sunday that all government and private hospitals in the city would only treat Delhi residents till the rising COVID-19 cases are contained. While informing people of this first-of-its-kind decision in the country to “reserve” hospitals even as cases mushroomed in the national capital, Mr. Kejriwal, said...