-Frontline DAVID SANDERS, Professor Emeritus and founding Director of the School of Public Health at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, is a specialist paediatrician with postgraduate qualifications in public health. One of the founders of the global public health movement, he has over 30 years' experience in health policy and programme development in Zimbabwe and South Africa, having advised governments as well as organisations such as...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Trained health workers and even schoolteachers can provide effective care to patients with an array of mental disorders and make up for shortages of psychiatrists, medical researchers from India and Europe said on Wednesday. The researchers, who examined experiments done in 22 developing countries including India, have found that doctors, nurses and even lay health workers untrained in mental health or neurology can provide health care to mentally...

-Down to Earth Half of India's population defecates in the open. In all probability, they will continue to do so for the next 10 years By the time you read this article, some 600 million Indians must have taken that first call of nature. But for most, it must have been very unusual: to take that hesitant and humiliating step out of their homes to defecate in the open. Everyday, an...

-DNA An allocation of Rs 17,700 crore in the 2013-2014 Union Budget but not a single accountable rupee spent for pre-school education or a plate of food for the homeless children in Mumbai. Yoshita Sengupta investigates the absence of homeless children from ICDS registers Mumbai: In 2010, Ms. Rekha, a homeless woman living on the footpath in Mumbai in her last month of pregnancy, slipped while trying to cross a wall. She...

-The Indian Express The rural health cadre will not create two classes of doctors, it will help fill two different needs. The cabinet is pondering the idea of a cadre of mid-level health practitioners, a plan that has been fiercely resisted by medical associations because they worry it will dilute the worth of MBBS graduates. It has also been recently rejected by the parliamentary standing committee on health, for allegedly creating two...