An estimated 41 million people have been cured of tuberculosis (TB) over the past 15 years through a treatment strategy recommended by the United Nations health agency, according to a new report, but success remains fragile and governments must strengthen their determination to combat the DISEase. “With 1.7 million people dying from tuberculosis last year – including 380,000 women, many of whom were young mothers – these successes are far too...

West Bengal's farmers switched to new scientific material called 'Poly Mulching' (made out of plastic) to protect crops. The North Bengal region has got some highly fertile agricultural land. But weeds, lack of proper sunlight, heavy downpour, soil erosion, seed germination and cold weather conditions often result in harming the crops and ultimately curtailing agricultural production. However, to protect crops from such problems, farmers have now found a suitable way by using...

Developing countries should act now to head off their own "obesity epidemic", says a global policy group. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says obesity levels are rising fast. In a report in the Lancet medical journal, it says low-income countries cannot cope with the health consequences of wide scale obesity. Rates in Brazil and South Africa already outstrip the OECD average. Increasing obesity in industrialised countries such as the UK and...

The next stage of a measles immunization drive supported by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO) began today in India, aiming to reach 134 million children and prevent an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 annual deaths from the DISEase. The children in the states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh will begin receiving the second dose of their vaccinations as part of a year-long campaign by the...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...