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The Week July 08,2020 Sweden, the Scandinavian nation, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven never imposed a lockdown like many other nations across the world did at the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak. However, Sweden’s different approach of herd immunity did not exactly work in the nation’s favour. In the nation with a population of 1.02 crore, the virus has so far claimed more than 5,420 lives. This may seem like a low number in comparison with a number like 130,000 fatalities in the US, but given the population of the country, the total number of cases per million of population in Sweden amounts to 40 per cent more than those in the US and 12 times more than in Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark, The  New York Times  reported. The Swedish government was taking the approach of herd immunity to tackle the pandemic. Herd immunity, according to  Healthline , can happen in two ways: 1. Many people contract...

DAWN March 26, 2020 The coronavirus pandemic is threatening the entire human race, the United Nations warned on Wednesday as it launched a humanitarian response plan featuring an appeal for $2 billion to help the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. “Covid-19 is threatening the whole of humanity — and the whole of humanity must fight back,” Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in announcing the initiative. “Global action and solidarity are crucial. Individual country responses are not going to be enough.” By Wednesday night the coronavirus pandemic had killed more than 20,000 people worldwide, over 13,000 of them in Europe, according to a tally. The UN plan “aims to enable us to fight the virus in the world’s poorest countries, and address the needs of the most vulnerable people, especially women and children, older people, and those with disabilities or chronic illness,” said the UN chief. World Bank and International Monetary Fund urge bilateral creditors ...

India Today March 24, 2020 Sonali Acharjee hen the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) released a statement on March 23 recommending use of the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a preventive medicine for those who face a high risk of coronavirus infection, C. Banerjee, a 69-year-old resident of Delhi’s Kalkaji, says the news gave him the shivers. In the 1980s, as cases of malaria began to increase in India, chloroquine (which is closely related to hydroxychloroquine) was widely prescribed. "It is like swallowing death," recounts Banerjee. Reported side effects of chloroquine include nausea, headache, mood swings, skin irritation, swelling, cramps, pale skin, muscle weakness, bleeding from nose and hearing problems. An overdose can result in death. Hydroxychloroquine too can lead to headaches, nausea, lowering of blood glucose, drowsiness, reduced appetite, depression, irreversible blindness, cramps and heart failure (if overdosed). "It leaves a hor...

Dawn Ikram Junaidi Fearing that year 2020 can be more lethal, the government has decided to get latest technology from Australia to control dengue. Moreover, it has also been decided that preventive steps would be started from February 2020 so that larva of the dengue mosquito could not spread.  This year, 53,805 dengue cases and 95 deaths were reported in the country. According to a document available with  Dawn , 13,292 of the cases were reported from Islamabad, 16,657 from Sindh, 10,118 from Punjab, 7,876 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 3,474 from Balochistan, 1,690 from AJK and 696 cases were included in the ‘other’ category. In some cases, it cannot be ascertained in which province the patient was bitten by the mosquito. So such cases are placed in the ‘other’ category.  At least 46 people died of dengue in Sindh, 22 in Islamabad, 23 in Punjab, three in Balochistan and one person in AJK. National Institute of Health (NIH) Executive Director Maj Gen Dr Aame...

The Indian Express October 10, 2019 By Avantika Ghosh Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday released the strategy document, which stated, “In the past few years, the government of India has placed health high on its political agenda and made a commitment to make significant increases in public spending in health." The World Health Organisation’s Country Cooperation Strategy for India for 2019-23 has heaped praise on the government for its “commitment” and for setting goals that recognise and act upon India’s changing health landscape where non-communicable diseases have replaced communicable diseases. Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan on Wednesday released the strategy document, which stated, “In the past few years, the government of India has placed health high on its political agenda and made a commitment to make significant increases in public spending in health. The National Health Policy 2017 calls for more than doubling in government health spending ...

Financial Express October 08, 2019 By Virander Singh Chauhan By investing in vaccine development, India can create lasting health and economic benefits for its citizens. In fact, vaccines are one of the most cost-effective public health interventions. The last two months have seen a constant and disturbing flow of news from the Democratic Republic of the Congo about the resurgence of Ebola. The current outbreak, which has now been declared a public health emergency of international concern, has already claimed nearly 2,500 lives. The situation has captured worldwide attention, with public health experts, scientists and health workers racing to contain the disease. A serious and highly contagious virus, Ebola is fatal for approximately half of the people it infects. While experts worry that the worst is yet to come, the current outbreak still pales in comparison to the 2014-16 epidemic, which spread to 10 countries—including four outside of Africa—and resulted in over 28,0...

WHO April 13, 2019 At a global forum on fair pricing and access to medicines, delegates from governments and civil society organizations called for greater transparency around the cost of research and development as well as production of medicines, to allow buyers to negotiate more affordable prices.  The forum, co-hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Government of South Africa, aimed to provide a global platform for frank discussion among all stakeholders - including governments, civil society organizations and the pharmaceutical industry – in order to identify strategies to reduce medicine prices and expand access for all. The affordability of medicines has long been a concern for developing countries, but today it is also a global one. Each year, 100 million people fall into poverty because they have to pay for medicines out-of-pocket. High-income countries’ health authorities are increasingly having to ration medicines for cancer, hepatitis C an...

Indian Express October 30, 2018   Anuradha Mascarenhas Over 1.25 lakh children in India below the age of five died in 2016 due to the impact of polluted air and almost one in five children who die from toxic air exposure across the world is from India, a new study by the World Health Organisation has said.  The WHO report, titled ‘Air Pollution and Child Health: Prescribing Clean Air’, found that polluted air inside households — generated from burning fossil fuels for cooking, lighting and heating — contributed to the deaths of about 67,000 children below the age of five in India in 2016. The study also said that outdoor air pollution, specifically PM2.5, caused by vehicular and industrial emissions and a host of other factors, accounted for nearly 61,000 deaths among children of that age group in 2016. The WHO study, which examined the toll on children breathing hazardous levels of both outdoor and household air pollution, focused on dangerous particulate matter with a...

Aditi Goyal 12/AUG/2018 “After a prolonged decline, world hunger appears to be on the rise again”, claims  a report titled ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (2017)’ by the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. Nowhere is this more true than in India, which is home to 190.7 million undernourished people, the most in any country. While this may seem like a fantastic claim in the context of the fastest growing economy in the world, here are some statistics from the report: –14.5% of the Indian population is under-nourished –47.5 million Indian children under five years of age are stunted – again, the most in any country in the world –51.4% of Indian women of reproductive age (15-49 years) suffer from anaemia –64.9% of Indian women (the highest proportion in the world) rely exclusively on breastfeeding for feeding infants between 0-5 months of age These numbers certainly tell a story – but numbers are, by definition, abstract concep...

August 01, 2018 The Hindu By George Thomas The recent controversy about transparency in the working of the cadaver transplant programme in Tamil Nadu has provided an opportunity to revisit the vexed question of medical rationing in India. It is a hard reality that not all medical interventions are available to every citizen who may need it. The gap between what is technologically possible and what government hospitals generally provide widened appreciably after the technological leaps in medical care began, starting in the 1980s. Covert medical rationing The NITI Aayog’s document, ‘Three Year Action Agenda, 2017-18 to 2019-20’, has a section on health care. One of the recommendations is for the government to prioritise preventive care rather than provide curative care. The document also advises the government to pay attention to stewardship of the health sector in its entirety rather than focussing on provision of health care. Therefore, the system of private health car...

Firstpost July 11,2018 Indo-Asian News service India spends just a little over one percent of its GDP on healthcare and this is leading the country into "a comprehensive healthcare crisis", according to Nobel laureate and noted economist Amartya Sen, who has called for greater allocation on healthcare in India and highlighted what he calls "three general failures" in the country's healthcare segment. "The fact that India allocates only a little over 1 percent of its gross domestic product on public healthcare contrasts sharply, for example, with nearly three times as much by China. We reap as we sow, and cannot expect to get what other countries achieve by allocating much more resources — as a proportion of their respective levels of the gross national product — to healthcare," Sen writes in his elaborate foreword to  Healers or Predators? Healthcare Corruption in India , which will be launched in New Delhi on Thursday. Sen, a recipient o...

Deccan Chronicle July 10, 2018 Kaniza Garari Hyderabad:  The cross-subsidy policy mooted by the Centre for Aysuhman Bharat, the National Health Protection Scheme, has hit a road block as the costing of cardiac surgeries and Caesarean section are not acceptable to the medical fraternity. The Indian Medical Association, which has its reach till the Tier IV towns, has categorically told the Centre that it would not be a part of the scheme due to the unscientific rating system. Dr T. Narsinga Reddy, president of the Telangana Medical Association and IMA sub-committee member on Ayushman Bharat, said, “The package rates are very low. It is not practical to work at such low rates.” Dr Narsinga Reddy said the Centre had not carried out scientific costing. “We worked out the costing and have found that there are 21 different taxes that are being paid by small and medium size hospitals. Add to this is the cost of manpower, equipment and medical devices. The civil, infrastruct...