The region that consumes 50 per cent of the country’s pork is staring at an outbreak of classical swine flu and a host of other dreaded livestock DISEases in the coming two months, experts have predicted. The project directorate on animal DISEase monitoring and surveillance, Bangalore, has warned that four livestock DISEases, including haemorrhagic septicaemia, black quarter, foot-and-mouth DISEase and classical swine fever, will hit the Northeast in February-March. The directorate, which...

-PTI Outbreak of measles in remote villages in East Kameng district of Arunachal Pradesh has been reported with detection of at least 30 cases. According to official sources here today, the worst affected villages in the district are Namchar Bagang and Soshi Bagang, around 17 kilometres from Chayangtajo, the circle headquarter.         Villagers have been forced to take shelter at makeshifts accommodations in deep forest, in order to remain isolated from other infected...

The lesson for India after Durban is that it needs to formulate an approach that combines attention to industrialised countries’ historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of its own responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories. This is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, India’s own domestic national approach of actively exploring “co-benefits” – policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains – suggests that it...

-PTI   An elderly resident of Indore has alleged that her husband died in 2010 following a drug trial a government doctor conducted on him without his consent. The doctor in question, Salil Bhargava, denied that he was involved in any “illegal or unethical” drug trials. “We have carried out all the drug trials after getting due consent from the patients for which they were duly insured. We have all records with us in...

-The United Nations   With no registered polio cases over the past year, India is on course to becoming free of the DISEase, the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) reported today. If all pending samples for the virus test negative, India – once regarded as the world’s epicentre for polio – will become free of the DISEase for the first time in its history, reducing the number of polio-endemic countries to three:...