-The Hindu   Every day, more than 5,000 people develop tuberculosis; nearly three lakh children drop out of school owing to the disease and more than one lakh women are rejected by families in India. A middle-aged patient with a history of cough with blood-tinged sputum for three weeks duration consults a doctor. The physician puts forth a routine query whether anyone in his family suffers/suffered from tuberculosis? Annoyed, the patient responds: no...

-Outlook A govt in credibility crisis wants to see the food security bill through The UPA-II government's flagship programme, the Food Security Bill, which comes with a neat price tag of Rs 1.23 lakh crore, holds the promise of eradicating hunger. If passed, the bill, it is expected, will ensure foodgrain to 67 per cent of the poor. Surely, with elections round the corner, no political party can risk opposing it....

-Outlook Patna: BJP today asked the Centre to remove "inadequacies" in the ambitious Food bill by increasing its coverage area and fixing all foodgrains at a flat Rs 1 a kg and suggested that it should be modelled after Chhattisgarh food legislation. "The UPA government should remove inadequacies in the Food Bill by extending the benefit to larger section of population," BJP national spokesman Shahnawaz Hussain told reporters. Hailing the success...

-Down to Earth The country's 76 million poor have been denied the right to claim subsidised foodgrain under public distribution system The government has denied 76 million people in the country eligible to access public distribution system (PDS) the benefits of the food security system. For the past 20 years, the government has not cared to refresh its data and has been distributing foodgrain according to the population figure of 1991. Worse, the...

-The Times of India A study on the causes of severe diarrhoea in young children, conducted at seven sites in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asian countries including India, has found that rotavirus is responsible for most such cases. The Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS), published in the latest issue of Lancet, shows diarrhoeal disease, which is responsible for one in every ten child deaths during the first five years of life worldwide,...