Malaria kills around 205,000 people in India each year, more than 13 times the estimate made by the World Health Organization, researchers said on Thursday. WHO, the public health arm of the UN, estimates that approximately 15,000 people a year die from malaria in India, and 100,000 adults worldwide. The researchers called for both figures to be urgently revised so they do not hurt funding for prevention, rapid diagnosis and treatment. “If you...

Lancet dismisses criticisms levelled at the “rural MBBS,” saying they bear little credibility The Union Health and Family Welfare Ministry might still be awaiting “formal” clearance for its much debated Bachelor of Rural Health Care course that aims to create a cadre of healthcare workers for the rural areas, but the Centre has received global appreciation for “trying to find an innovative solution to a deeply entrenched problem which is not...

Two "neglected diseases" -- dengue and cysticercosis -- are costing India nearly $45 million between them every year. According to WHO, around 1 billion of the world's poorest people suffer from such neglected tropical diseases, mostly in urban slums. The global health watchdog said in its latest report the societal monetary cost of cysticercosis -- an infectious disease caused by the pork tapeworm Taenia solium -- is estimated to be $15.27...

Latin America, the poster child of bad economic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s, is leading the way in one rapidly evolving area of social development: conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. These schemes provide cash payments to poor households that meet certain behavioural requirements, generally related to children’s healthcare and education. The idea here is to support minimal levels of consumption through income transfers, while encouraging long-term human development. The...

Now that it’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) week, expect a host of studies/ articles/ commentaries around how India has failed to meet the important MDGs, on how parts of India are worse than sub-Saharan Africa or Bangladesh when it comes to nutrition, and so on. The UN set the ball rolling when it said that “with just five years to the 2015 deadline for achieving the MDGs, the country as a...