-Live Mint The country is a happy hunting ground for communicable diseases In a Mint article last week, economist Dean Spears pointed out that the double whammy of high population density and unsanitary conditions in India stunts the growth of children, who bear a disproportionate burden of infectious diseases and lose their ability to absorb nutrients. Unless India ramps up its public health system, providing extra food will mean little for...

-Economic and Political Weekly     The puzzle of persistent undernutrition in India is largely explained by open defecation, population density, and lack of sanitation and hygiene. The impact on nutrition of many faecally-transmitted infections, not just the Diarrhoeas, has been a blind spot. In hygienic conditions much of the undernutrition in India would disappear. Robert Chambers (r.chambers@ids.ac.uk) is with the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK and Gregor von Medeazza (gvonmedeazza@unicef.org)...

-The Times of India In the decade or so that i was at the Planning Commission, i always had advisory responsibility for the food ministry/public distribution system, among other issues of development policy. It did not take very long to find out that the fundamental problem with the system was about so-called "leakages" abetted by corruption: One soon learnt that the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was one of the most...

-The Telegraph The medical fraternity is worried over the seizure of sub-standard and fake drugs, at times lethal for patients. Police on Wednesday seized 30 boxes of suspected spurious drugs from a cart in the Gandhi Maidan area. Station House Officer of Gandhi Maidan police station Rajbindu Prasad said nobody could produce transaction bills for the consignment. The drugs seized were ofloxacin (for respiratory tract infections), oflozen (for typhoid), ossopan (calcium tablets prescribed...

-The Hindu Over 1,00,000 children, below the age of 11 months, die of Diarrhoea annually in India which is the second leading killer of young children globally, after pneumonia. India accounts for the highest number of Diarrhoeal deaths, a latest study has suggested. A new international study published in the latest edition of the British medical journal The Lancetprovides the clearest picture yet of the impact and most common causes of Diarrhoeal...