Although life expectancy at birth for both the sexes has improved over the last quarter of a century, a recent report points out that ‘non-communicable diseases’ (NCDs) now account for a larger proportion of total deaths vis-à-vis ‘communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional disease' (CMNNDs). The report entitled India: Health of the Nation’s States - The India State-Level Disease Burden Initiative, which has been prepared after two years of intense collaborative...

-Hindustan Times As per the latest National Nutrition Monitoring Bureau, which has been collecting data on diet and nutritional status of rural, tribal and urban populations for almost four decades, the calorie intake of children (1-3 years) in rural areas was only about 70% of their requirement due to shortage. In India, more than 4.8 crore children suffer from stunting, which means they are below the normal height range for their...

-The Times of India Many members of the Niti Aayog's newly constituted Working Group on Nutrition have significant conflicts of interests. Several are representatives of international agencies, which have close ties to multinational food companies including Nestle, Hindustan Unilever, Coca Cola, Monsanto, Mars and Ajinomoto, and which have been pushing packaged therapeutic food to address malnutrition. The government has repeatedly clarified that packaged energy dense food is against India's policy on...

-Scroll.in She served as the head of Indian Council of Medical Research. Dr Soumya Swaminathan, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, has been appointed the Deputy Director General, Programmes, of the World Health Organisation. Swaminathan is a paediatrician and is known for her research in tuberculosis. This would be second highest position in the organisation, below the Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who took over the post this...

-The Hindu Around the world, nearly 1.6 billion people are affected by a group of diseases so ignored that the term used to refer to them is called neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). These are a cluster of 17 diseases affecting the poorest people living in the least developed pockets of the world. While some of these diseases may be unfamiliar, leprosy, kala-azar and filariasis are better known in India and being targeted...