-Down to Earth Punjab has paid a price for food security. The use of pesticides and fertilisers has resulted in a number of health issues for the state’s population Punjab — known as the ‘Granary of India’ — produces 20 per cent and nine per cent of India’s wheat and rice respectively. At the international level, this represents three per cent of the global production of these crops. The state is responsible...

-World Health Organisation Newsroom India is among the countries most dramatically affected by snakebite and accounts for almost half the total number of annual deaths in the world. Authors of the article entitled ‘Trends in snakebite mortality in India from 2000 to 2019 in a nationally representative mortality study’ analysed 2,833 snakebite deaths from 611,483 verbal autopsies from an earlier study and conducted a systematic literature review from 2000-2019 covering 87,590...

-Livemint.com * The pandemic-induced global pause resulted in several visible environmental gains. Will they last? * A controversy is brewing over the government’s efforts to push through radical changes to the country’s environmental laws, which seek to further dilute environmental protections NAGPUR: Teeming wildlife; cities breathing fresh air; and clearer rivers. Those were all small signs of hope amid a dire, once-in-a-century pandemic. Nature was supposedly healing. At one point in April, an...

-The Hindu Projects in critical forest habitats are being considered or have been given clearance by the Environment Ministry Few countries are witnessing such severe direct and indirect devastation on account of the COVID-19 pandemic as India. Yet, there is little attention on the roots of our vulnerability. Our challenge is hardly limited to escaping a virus with lockdowns and masks in the short term, and vaccination in the long term. It would...

-Down to Earth Document emphasises on importance of a ‘One-Health’ approach to manage and prevent zoonotic disease outbreaks and pandemics About 60 per cent of known infectious diseases in humans and 75 per cent of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic, according to a new report published recently by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). Preventing the Next Pandemic:Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain...