Air pollution is among the most pressing challenges in creating a healthy society. It has been a bane on Indians’ public health for decades as the State of Global Air Report 2020 underlined. To discuss this, Health Issues India spoke with T. M. Chen, president of Continental Carbon India Limited (CCIL) and Master of Chemical Engineering […]
environmental health
Loss of green space in India shown to be associated with higher cardiometabolic risk
Loss of green space due to urban development may be associated with an increase in several cardiometabolic risk factors, according to a study conducted by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal). The study investigated the association between land-use changes in a periurban area south of Telangana state capital Hyderabad where urbanisation – involving the […]
COVID-19 situation in Delhi “unprecendented” says Niti but no new lockdown on the horizon
The COVID-19 situation in Delhi is “unprecedented” according to government think tank Niti Aayog. However, the state health minister has disavowed a new lockdown. During a meeting chaired by Union Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, Niti Aayog chairman Dr Vinod K. Paul warned that the COVID-19 situation in Delhi “is likely to become worse.” […]
Environmentalism in a time of COVID
Last year, Time magazine named Greta Thunberg their Person of the Year. The now-seventeen-year-old climate activist from Sweden has inspired a global movement, assuming the role of a bastion for environmentalism. Across the world, young people have protested for their future, for the future of their environment, and their planet – including in India. Thunberg […]
India’s pollution crisis: 2 million lives a year
Air pollution continues to claim millions of lives every year with India leading the world in this regard. More than two million lives are lost to breathing toxic air in the country every year, in a grim reminder that India’s pollution crisis is among the leading threats to its environment and to public health. The […]
Child health: How climate change will affect it
“A child born today will experience a world that is more than four degrees warmer than the pre-industrial average, with climate change impacting human health from infancy and adolescence to adulthood and old age,” reads a report published yesterday by The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change – lending a chilling insight into the […]
Air quality plummets to emergency levels in Delhi
Air quality in the national capital has plummeted to emergency levels, with Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal once again likening the city to a ‘gas chamber’. In declaring the emergency, the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPCA) ordered that schools be shuttered in the National Capital Region (NCR), imposed a moratorium on construction activities, and […]
The hunger of a nation: What the GHI tells India
India has slipped on the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Global Hunger Index (GHI), ranking 102nd out of 117 countries. Countries are scored by the GHI between zero and 100, with India scoring 30.3 – worse than the score for the South Asia region as a whole, which the GHI puts at 29.3. India fares […]
Pollution season: Is Delhi ready?
Authorities in Delhi have been instructed to formulate easily implementable plans for pollution control in the national capital’s pollution hotspots, as the winter – a time associated with intense air pollution in the city – arrives. “Our focus this year has to be implementation of action plans on hotspots. However, these action plans cannot be […]
Environmental toxins: AIIMS issues warning
A grave warning has been issued by doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) about the sheer number of people with dangerous levels of environmental toxins in their systems. AIIMS physicians tested 216 severely ill patients for whom there was no clear reason behind their ailment. Of these, 32 (14.8 percent) displayed […]