The health ministry on Thursday forcefully denied the allegation levelled by the opposition that Indian girls are being used as guinea pigs for anti-cervical cancer vaccines. Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, replying to a calling attention notice in the Rajya Sabha, said that use of HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccines imported by Merck and CERVARIX (manufactured by GSK) have been stopped in the country. The ministry has also constituted a committee...

Four infants aged below two years died and 17 children fell ill after they were administered an anti-measles and tetanus vaccine at Anganwadi centres in Damoh town, in Madhya Pradesh. Around 20 infants were administered the vaccine at two Anganwadi centres in Damoh on Friday afternoon. By Sunday afternoon, four of these infants were dead while the others had been admitted to a local hospital in a critical condition. Preliminary...

Defending the alternative model for undergraduate medical education to create a separate cadre of “rural doctors,” Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Thursday that the scheme would not compromise with the quality of medical education or reduce the importance of trained and specialised doctors. Inaugurating a two-day national workshop here to discuss the programme for starting a specialised course of Bachelor of Rural Medicine and...

KEY TRENDS   • As per the 2019 Global Hunger Index report, neighbouring countries such as China (GHI score: 6.5; GHI rank: 25), Sri Lanka (GHI score: 17.1; GHI rank: 66), Myanmar (GHI score: 19.8; GHI rank: 69), Nepal (GHI score: 20.8; GHI rank: 73), Bangladesh (GHI score: 25.8; GHI rank: 88) and Pakistan (GHI score: 28.5; GHI rank: 94) have outperformed India (GHI score: 30.3; GHI rank: 102) *13    • As per the 2018 Global Hunger Index report,...

KEY TRENDS   • At the national level, the proportion of government schools having facilities like drinking water was 96.39 percent, boys' toilet was 94.64 percent, girls' toilet was 97.03 percent, boundary wall was 60.12 percent, playground was 56.98 percent, ramp was 71.50 percent, CWSN toilet was 19.59 percent, electricity was 56.45 percent and library was 79.36 percent, according to the Unified District Information System For Education (UDISE) 2017-18 (Provisional) *12   • ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’ data shows a clear...