-PTI   One in six Americans are now living below poverty line, the Census Bureau said in a report, reflecting the adverse impact of economic crisis on common man. “The nation’s official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 per cent, up from 14.3 per cent in 2009 — the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate,” Census Bureau said in its report. “There were 46.2 million people in poverty in 2010, up from...

-The Hindu   India ranks very high among the nations struck by the rising wave of “premature deaths” caused by non-communicable diseases, mainly heart and blood ailments, the WHO said in its latest report on Wednesday. The report said that cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory problems, blood pressure and diabetes are an offshoot of growing affluence of the middle classes as well as worsening health conditions among people below poverty line. “Exposure to the...

The famine in the Horn of Africa is being seen as an inevitable consequence of drought, "the worst for 60 years". But this famine was almost entirely preventable, and presenting it as a natural disaster doesn't help; nor does our insistence on waiting for a major crisis before responding. Even though lessons about how to prevent famines have been documented time and time again, we don't learn. The conflict in Somalia...

While Indian psychiatrists have rejected a World Health Organisation (WHO) study portraying India as the depression capital of the world, they say it has indirectly drawn attention to an acute shortage of trained personnel and facilities to deal with mental illness. "Declaring India as having the highest rate of major depression in the world is an aberration in interpretation," Dr. Roy Abraham Kallivayalil, secretary-general of the World Association of Social Psychiatry,...

Studies by the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Academic Forum on food security issues in the three countries suggest that providing food access works best when backed by cash transfers. A paper on food security brought out by the UNDP’s Brasilia-based International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG), under the Forum, shows that despite the great strides in food production made by India people in this country are just not eating enough. Citing indices...