-The Hindu Chronic corruption and lack of affordable access to treatments for serious diseases in the public health system stand exposed in the kidney commerce scandal in Tamil Nadu's Dharmapuri district. Nothing can be a greater irony than the existence of such thriving sale of organs in a State that also has perhaps the best-run programme for donation of kidneys, livers, hearts and lungs by deceased donors. It is no small...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The doctors at a private hospital recently diagnosed a 23-day-old child with life-threatening 'blue baby syndrome' caused by consumption of contaminated water. They found that the baby, from Dhamori Khurd village in Gautam Budh Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, was being fed packaged formula milk mixed in water from the borewell, which had high nitrate content, as clean drinking water was not available. "When the baby came...

-AFP ROME: The UN's food agency on Tuesday said obesity and poor nutrition weigh heavily on the global economy and told governments that investing in food health would bring big economic as well as social returns. Lost productivity and spiralling health care bills linked to malnutrition "could account for as much as five per cent of global gross domestic product (GDP)," equivalent to $3.5 trillion (2.6 trillion euros) a year, the Food...

-The Times of India The government has provided a back-door entry for contractors and the food industry to corner the lucrative ICDS food supply budget through the National Food Security Bill - a move that had seen controversy earlier too but could now become part of the law if passed by Parliament. In a footnote to one of the three schedules of the bill, the government has provided that children between 6...

-The Hindu The United Nations has been drawing attention in recent years to the growing burden of non-communicable diseases, which have been adding to morbidity and premature deaths in most countries. In a declaration issued at a high-level meeting in 2011, the U.N. argued that low and middle income countries should actively pursue public health policies that will reduce the incidence of NCDs arising from diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and a...