-Press release by World Health Organisation dated 27 October, 2022 An estimated 10.6 million people fell ill with tuberculosis (TB) in 2021, an increase of 4.5% from 2020, and 1.6 million people died from TB (including 187 000 among HIV positive people), according to the World Health Organization’s 2022 Global TB report. The burden of drug-resistant TB (DR-TB) also increased by 3% between 2020 and 2021, with 450 000 new cases...

-Newsclick.in Inequality is not natural but manufactured. It’s time policymakers stopped normalising the wealth and income gap. Else, post-Covid inequality could become a permanent feature. Wealth and income inequality are more than just economic concepts. They also influence education and health outcomes, poverty levels, employment and unemployment rates, opportunities, choices, and, ultimately, happiness. Of late, several reports have investigated the impact of COVID-19 on various segments of society at the regional, national,...

-The Hindu Being fiscally conservative resulted in a rise in extreme poverty, with there being no signs of any course correction A recent World Bank report, titled “Correcting Course”, captures the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global poverty. The number of people living in extreme poverty rose by seven crore million in 2020, as the global poverty rate rose from 8.4% in 2019 to 9.3% in 2020. This is the first...

-The Telegraph Sanjay Mohanty, professor of population health at International Institute of Population Sciences, says steady fall in total health spending in proportion to GDP is 'worrying' India’s per capita healthcare expenditure at constant prices has remained near-stagnant despite increases in Government spending and decreases in household spending on healthcare over a six-year period, the latest national health accounts report has shown. India’s per capita total healthcare expenditure has changed little over that...

-The Telegraph The economy remains vulnerable to headwinds The shortfall in economic growth in the April-June quarter against rosier predictions of most, including the central bank, came as a surprise.Few anticipated the gap between expected and actual performance would be as much (2.5-3 percentage points). It has prompted a tide of downward revisions for the whole year; these follow a previous round, two months ago, due to inflation, higher interest rates, and...