The passport office in Hyderabad reported the highest number of passport applications recorded in Indian history (at least 450,000) and it expects an increase of 15-20% this year Jamuna Kunta sits stiffly in a plush red chair at the Hyderabad press club, holding her head proudly erect as she quietly recounts the events leading to her husband’s suicide in Dubai. A farmer from Karimnagar, a rural district in Andhra Pradesh, her husband...

The world is experiencing a change in the geographic distribution of DISEases. Traditionally, infectious DISEases, which claim the lives of so many children, affected poor countries, and noncommunicable DISEases like diabetes, cardiac ailments and cancer plagued rich countries. But the latest statistics released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) Friday show that the income level of nations is no longer so important, and that all countries now face the burden of...

An increasing number of countries face a double burden of DISEase as the prevalence of risk factors for chronic DISEases such as diabetes, heart DISEases and cancers increase and many nations still struggle to reduce maternal and child deaths caused by infectious DISEases, according to a United Nations statistical health report released today. “This evidence really shows that no country in the world can address health from either an infectious DISEase...

Within weeks of getting bail from the Supreme Court in connection with charges of sedition, human rights activist Binayak Sen has been made member of the Planning Commission's Steering Committee on Health, which will advise the panel on the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012-2017). Binayak Sen, who was released on bail from the Raipur jail last month, will, based on his experience of having worked as a paediatrician in Chhattisgarh's tribal belt,...

Endosulfan, the pesticide which is widely believed to be responsible for thousands of deaths, DISEases and devastation, was able to save its own life largely because of India’s questionable efforts at global forums. The controversial pesticide has been in news for a long time because of its harmful effects on humans, wild life and the environment. Obviously the $100 million industry is going out of the way to defend the...