The Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation (MoWR, RD & GR) in its latest report has identified arsenic hotspots across the country, most notably in the states of Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Please consult chart-3 to get an idea about the geographical spread of arsenic hotspots in India. On the basis of arsenic concentration in the range 0.01-0.05 mg per litre...

-The Telegraph The world can move towards meaningful health only when dietary interventions and models are made more representative The way to the heart is, apparently, through the stomach. Would that, then, mean that food habits all over the world have to change, given that cardiovascular diseases — the result of an unhealthy diet — are a leading cause of death around the globe? The findings of a report compiled by a...

-The Telegraph Shortcoming to affect follow-up care Only a fourth of patients with chronic diseases who attend government clinics in India receive all the key information they need for future follow-up care by other doctors, a study has suggested. Only 24 per cent of the outpatient clinic documents the study screened mentioned all four pieces of key information: the diagnosis, prescribed medication, long-term care instructions and follow-up information. The study found that 32...

-The Indian Express Progress on non-communicable diseases should not be benchmarked against sustainable development goals. In the last week of September, India’s health ministry received the prestigious UN Inter-Agency Task Force Award for “outstanding contribution to the achievement of NCD (Non-Communicable Diseases) related SDG targets”. At the same time, a Lancet paper by the monitoring group, NCD Countdown 2030, contended that India will fall short of the NCD targets pertaining to SDGS....

-The Hindu Business Line The Ayushman Bharat programme must aim to reverse poverty caused by healthcare expenses The state of India’s healthcare system is somewhat dichotomous — the country is a global supplier of life-saving, affordable and good quality generic medicines, yet lakhs of families are driven into poverty because they are forced to spend much of their earnings and savings on medications to treat chronic and life-threatening diseases. The poor, particularly,...