-The United Nations Only one-third of the world's countries have national strategies for viral hepatitis, the United Nations health agency today said urging Governments to scale up measures to tackle this ‘silent epidemic,' in particular the five types that, over time, cause chronic and debilitating illnesses. "The fact that many hepatitis B and C infections are silent, causing no symptoms until there is severe damage to the liver, points to the urgent...

-IANS Bangalore: A leading journal of medical ethics has charged the World Health Organization (WHO) with promoting the Pentavalent vaccine in countries, including India, though it is known to have caused adverse reactions and deaths in children. In a hard-hitting editorial, the latest issue of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME), has accused the WHO of promoting the vaccine "by stating falsely that no adverse event following immunisation (AEFI) has ever...

Adding to the debate over celebrity economists blaming India’s malnutrition and stunting vis-à-vis Sub Saharan Africa on genetic differences, Dean Spears, a public health expert and a visiting fellow at Delhi School of Economics, offers evidence connecting our poor sanitation and open defecation with high morbidity and malnutrition. (see both links below). In an evidence-based paper titled Policy Lessons from Implementing India’s Total Sanitation Campaign (2012), based on the review...

-Reuters Raipur/Patna: The deaths of at least 23 children who were poisoned after eating a free school meal has triggered an outcry over food safety just as the ruling Congress party is set to launch an ambitious plan to feed 800 million poor, with an eye on elections due within a year. Congress leader Sonia Gandhi‘s national subsidised food project includes free school meals and expands existing handouts to make it probably...

-The Hindu Clamping down on tobacco use, with measures such as tripling taxes on cigarettes and bidis, could cut by a quarter the deaths from heart disease and stroke that occur in India over the next decade, according to a modelling study just published in PLOS Medicine. Over nine million lives could be saved between 2013 and 2022 by vigorously implementing tobacco control policies in this country, say Sanjay Basu of Stanford...