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The current Tehelka carries a very simplistic piece on encephalitis deaths (for example, “immunoglobulin — a drug that cures encephalitis”) but it’s encouraging to see a spate of media pieces on deaths caused by infectious disease in India. There was a more thoughtful piece after last year’s monsoon season in the Wall Street Journal (reprinted in …

Is there real outrage over preventable deaths from infectious disease? Read More »

This long piece from Open Magazinesuggests that foreign donors may have too much influence over India’s think tanks. Most of the article is not about health but it has this to say, “In the field of health policy, one of the most influential thinktanks is the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). Since it was …

Do foreigners have too much influence over India’s think tanks Read More »

Zee News  and other outlets report a new global burden of disease study that shows India lagging well behind other Asian countries on key health parameters. Life expectancy at birth in India was 58.3 in 1990; it went up to 65.2 in 2010 but the comparable figures for Bangladesh were a jump from 58.9 to 69 years …

Pakistan, Bangladesh do better than India on key health parameters Read More »

Two separate, yet related events spell good news for children under five in India. The first is the news that over five million children have been vaccinated in just over a year with the five-in-one pentavalent vaccine as part of routine immunisation in six states in India. Besides offering protection against diptheria, tetanus, whooping cough …

Tackling the threats of pneumonia and diarrhoea Read More »

Today carried a Wall Street Journal article which rings many alarm bells on India’s new strategy for dealing with TB resistant to most antibiotics treatment. The WSJ has run a series of articles on this subject over the past year but this is a new claim: that India’s emergency strategy is now “encouraging TB to instead …

Is India’s new approach to TB “complete nonsense”? Read More »

It’s fashionable to moan about health never figuring on India’s political agenda. As we have suggested before in this blog, that may be changing. There is now a big, heavy duty argument involving philosophy, economics, ideology and all of the other components of a true political discussion. This  article from Outlook is a well-written, if …

Big questions about health turn political in India Read More »

In a hard-hitting op-ed this week in The Hindu, former Health Secretary Sujatha Rao bemoans “the absence of a well thought out policy framework for strengthening the health system.” She accuses her former political masters of “knee-jerk solutions and unintelligent tinkering” and the states of responsibility for ineffective insurance schemes:  “new dimensions of fraudulent and …

Has India’s public health system collapsed? Read More »

Old allegations in the USA have been give new life in India (see this from today’s DNA, for example for a particularly egregious example of unsubstantiated scare stories). However, new data from the US suggest that the HPV vaccine has the same levels of side effects as a placebo. It is beautifully presented in this …

Is the HPV vaccine safe? Read More »

The Hindu today reports that the Human Rights Law Network has brought a petition before the Supreme Court which effectively seeks to block access to HPV vaccines in both the private and the public sector in India. The petition may or may not get very far but it may cause yet another delay in Indians …

Radical lawyers’network sues to block HPV vaccines in India Read More »

The continued use of oral polio vaccine (OPV), whatever its scientific merits,  is high-risk in communications terms.  This is because OPV can cause paralysis like that caused by polio (although most cases of paralysis are unrelated to OPV). All developed countries now use inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) which does not carry the risk of transmitting …

The worst story about polio immunisation may be lurking Read More »