-The Telegraph The findings suggest that health parameters in poorest-performing states have deteriorated over the two-year period Measures of human health have fallen in eight states, including Bengal, with the steepest incremental drops over a two-year period in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, according to a health index released on Tuesday by Niti Aayog, the government’s think tank.   The index — a tool to assess states’ performance on 23 measures of health care...

-Newslaundry.com The election season seems to have skipped adivasis in the state that has recorded 19 deaths from starvation since 2017. On New Year’s Eve, Baghiya Birijiya lost her mother Budhni Birijiyan to hunger, cold, and extreme poverty in Latehar, one of India’s poorest districts. The family had so few means that they could not cremate the 80-year-old’s body for two days, until public pressure led the administration to intervene to provide...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Around 40% of the essential medicines in India with lowest MRP are priced significantly higher than estimated production costs, an assessment by the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows highlighting the “exorbitant” profiteering by pharmaceutical companies and the scope for lowering prices of drugs. While innovative and newer drugs for cancer, hepatitis C and rare diseases are out of reach of many due to their unaffordable prices,...

-News18.com While India has been able to marginally reduce the infants infected from Diphtheria, Tetanus and Measles, the cases of tuberculosis, Pneumonia, Pertussis and Diarrhoea have only magnified. Forty years after immunization was introduced for the first time in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed representatives from 54 countries at the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (PMNCH) and cited the renamed Mission Indradhanush—it aims to immunize all children under the...

-The Hindu Study raises safety, efficacy concerns; call for ban of irrational formulations Of the 110 anti-TB (tuberculosis) Fixed Dose Combinations (FDCs) available in India, only 32 (less than 30%) have been approved by the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO), the country’s drug regulator. In the case of malaria FDCs, only eight out of 20 (40%), have been approved. These statistics, that give rise to safety and efficacy concerns, have been brought...