-The Hindu Clamping down on tobacco use, with measures such as tripling taxes on cigarettes and bidis, could cut by a quarter the deaths from heart disease and stroke that occur in India over the next decade, according to a modelling study just published in PLOS Medicine. Over nine million lives could be saved between 2013 and 2022 by vigorously implementing tobacco control policies in this country, say Sanjay Basu of Stanford...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The World Health Organisation wants India's public to give up Bollywood songs as caller tunes on their mobile phones and replace them with short health messages from superstars of India's entertainment industry. The global health agency today launched what is being dubbed as the world's first attempt to promote health campaigns via caller tunes, drawing on the voices of 10 personalities from Bollywood and other entertainment sectors. Amitabh Bachchan's...

-PTI   India could prevent over nine million deaths due to cardiovascular disease over the next decade if it implements smoking bans and levy higher tobacco taxes, a new study has found. Smoke-free laws and increased tobacco taxes would yield substantial and rapid health benefits by averting future cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths, researchers said. "Smoke-free legislation has not been consistently implemented, one in three adults reported being exposed to smoking at work in 2009...

-The Hindustan Times The recent release of The Lancet's special edition on Maternal and Child Nutrition in Delhi provided an occasion to debate the relevance of its recommendations for India. The discourse was enlivened by a statement, released ahead of the event by several Indian health experts, challenging the content and intent of some of the suggested interventions. Three authors of The Lancet series and many of the critics who issued that statement...

-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...