‘Use of locally available food can go a long way in keeping children healthy' Going local on food consumption is the way to keep children healthy. This simple truth – based as much on traditional wisdom as it is on scientific principle – is the message of the committee set up to address child malnutrition in Karnataka, which has prescribed a “feeding protocol” for children of different age groups, pregnant women...

Discovery of a deadly form of TB in a Mumbai hospital  underscores mismanagement In December last, when doctors at Hinduja Hospital in Mumbai raised the alarm over a deadly form of tuberculosis, the Union health ministry was quick to refute the claim. In its press release on January 17, the ministry said the term “totally drug resistant TB” is “misleading”; it is neither recognised by the national programme for TB control...

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state...

Iqbal Masud, the civil servant and critic, supported the ban on The Satanic Verses in 1989. His reason was simple: if the book remained on sale in India, Muslims would march in protest, policemen would fire upon them, some of them would die, and no book, said Masud, was worth the life of a single protester. There were, he allowed, legitimate arguments to be made about incitement, about mobs marching against...

Millions of Indians are suspected to be carriers of the drug-resistant bug After the scary New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1 or the “superbug” was detected two years ago, the world is now faced with the community-acquired methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (ca-MRSA) bacterium that is resistant to almost all common antibiotics. In India, where poor hygiene and the availability of over-the-counter antibiotics lead to development of resistance, an estimated 100 to 200 million people are reportedly...