Health & Sanitation

On Monday, October 21, at Neuroscience 2019, the Society for Neuroscience’s 49th annual meeting, held in Chicago, U.S., two neuroscientists warned the gathering that fellow scientists are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical red line of growing mini-brains or organoids in the laboratory that can perceive or feel things. Organoids are a group of cells...

Pneumonia is a disease of the lungs responsible for more deaths of children under the age of 5 than any other infectious disease. India has the highest number of childhood pneumonia cases in the world, both in terms of morbidity and mortality. Around 1.5 lakh children lose their life due to pneumonia each year...

It has been rightly said that ‘Prevention is better than cure.’  Especially in the context of healthcare. Technological advancement is taking slow but sure steps towards this ideal. Research laboratories working under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has announced the completion of genome sequencing of 1008 Indian individuals representing diverse ethnic groups...

Urban poverty and poor diets are intricately linked with one another. With most of the world’s population living in or considering moving to the urban centres, it is imperative to understand the reasons behind a lack of access to healthy diets. The problems of food insecurity and malnutrition are driven by both the income and...

A recently released Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (CNNS) survey shows that 35% of Indian children under five are stunted, 17% are wasted and 33 per cent are underweight. Only 42% of children (6 to 23 months) are fed at an adequate frequency and only 21% are fed an adequately diverse diet. Timely complementary feeding...

Visual impairment is one of the worst forms of disability, which causes the individual to be chronically dependent on someone else. It is very difficult to cope with this form of disability especially for the poor people as they cannot afford to equip the visually impaired person with required training and care which could...

The Micron Foundation, the non-profit arm of Micron Technology, is pleased to announce its partnership with The Akshaya Patra Foundation to provide wholesome mid-day meals to children in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Micron will be contributing $100,000 towards Akshaya Patra’s endeavour to serve hot, nutritious and hygienic meals to 5,000 children in Government and Government-aided...

India has made tremendous progress in terms of financial inclusion, cleanliness, technology, women empowerment and foreign policy in the last few years. The combined effort by the governments, corporates, Non-Profits and the citizens has paid off very well in achieving these goals that seemed like a faraway dream a while ago. However, India continues...

Medical abortion (MA) has emerged as the preferred method of abortion care in India. In fact, about 81% of the 15.6 million annual abortions are performed using MA drugs. MA is viewed as a safe, effective and simpler option for women who may have otherwise faced barriers in accessing safe abortion care. Considering the importance...

The World Bank estimates that more than a fifth of all communicable diseases in India (21%) are caused by contaminated water. According to a study by the Indian Nitrogen Group, a task force of scientists tracking the issue, the amount of reactive nitrogen in a bulk of the water bodies in India is already...

Radhika Joshi lost a loved one to kidney failure. That is when she realized that every year about 5 lakh individuals lose their lives due to the unavailability of organs and only 0.86% per million people donate their organs due to countless myths surrounding this cause. 19-year-old Radhika founded The Second Chance Project, which uses...

Access to vital health products, in India and around the world, is hampered by the last mile problem: the difficulty of matching the supply of medicine from central storage to the demand at urban and rural health facilities All too often, people requiring lifesaving care do not get the medicine they need when they...