-The Telegraph People who stop smoking before the age of 40 may on average gain an extra 10 years of life expectancy, according to a study that researchers say has relevance to India where people typically quit only after falling ill. A British study described as the world’s largest to assess the hazards of smoking and the benefits of quitting has shown that quitting before 40 can help avoid excess mortality observed...

-The Hindu The new Bill should pitch for free care to mental health patients in public hospitals. Persons with mental Illness have long been subjected to cruelty, neglect, ridicule and stigma. In the last half-century, medical science has made significant strides in finding some cures and palliatives for afflictions of the mind – of emotion, mood, thinking and behaviour. Parallel to this is the evolution in our ethical frameworks: of human rights,...

-The Times of India India loses Rs 69,000 crore a year—more than twice the sum of Rs 34,488 crore it set aside for the country's health budget in 2012—to small infections. What's more, an estimated 38 crore of its citizens catch small infections with the result that they lose 162 crore workdays every year. This is the shocking finding of a recent London School of Economics study that puts a question mark...

-Outlook Hazaribagh (Jharkhand): A non-governmental organisation's persistent efforts to stop prescribing diclofenac medicine by veterinary doctors to treat Illness in cattle has helped increase vulture population in Hazaribagh. Thanks to the efforts, the population of vulture, declared an endangered species worldwide, to jump five fold in this forested region. From a mere 60 or so, the vulture population in Hazaribagh has climbed to 300-plus, the convenor of the NGO Neo-Human Foundation, Satya Prakash,...

-Outlook Aiming to humanise the treatment of mental Illnesses, government has drafted a new Bill which proposes to give patients the right to choose in advance the kind of treatment and recommends use of electric shocks in rare cases. In the new draft law for mental sickness, government also proposes to ban electro convulsive treatment (ECT) (electric shocks) for minors as also its use directly in adults and recommended its use only...