Health issues in India
“It was something that I had never expected, I was really shocked,” Nandita Venkatesan said as she recalled finding out she had become re-infected with tuberculosis (TB) in 2013. It was six years after she was first diagnosed with the disease in 2007, some months before her eighteenth birthday. In a candid conversation profiled in […]
Drug resistance is one of the most pressing public health challenges facing India, especially when it comes to tuberculosis (TB). As the country grapples with one of the largest TB burdens in the world, rising cases of drug resistance presents an alarming trend. TB cases which become resistant to the most effective front-line drugs are […]
On February 4th, many attended a two-day gala organised by an MP. Attendees hailed from diverse backgrounds. Four different countries were represented at the gala. 61 political leaders were in attendance. Actors, experts and survivors all descended. What brought these many different stratas of the Indian – and, indeed, international – community together was a […]
Immunisation rates in Uttarakhand fell by more than thirty percentage points in two years. Now the state is using stringent measures to drive immunisation rates upwards. Immunisation rates in the state fell to just 61.32 percent of children aged nine to eleven months in 2017-18. This was down from 99.3 percent coverage in the 2015-16 […]
A total of 66 employees at the Tuberculosis Hospital in Sewri here contracted the disease in the past five years, authorities said in reply to an RTI query. Such a discovery may be indicative of a lack of safety and sanitation protocols at the hospital that is putting the lives of both staff and patients […]
In August 2016, a tribal man in Odisha walked ten kilometres from the hospital where his wife died. He carried her body with him – in the presence, no less, of his twelve-year-old daughter. He was forced to do so because the state hospital could not provide an ambulance. The incident served as a graphic […]
Access to healthcare has improved in India since 1990 – but not enough. Meanwhile, inequality persists. The country takes the 145th place out of 195 countries on the Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index. This measures the accessibility and quality of healthcare in countries by drawing on a plethora of data, including the 2016 Global […]
Although it still has the world’s highest tuberculosis burden. New infections, as well as deaths due to TB are falling in India. However, evidence has shown the number of drug resistant cases of TB in India are rising rapidly. These drug resistant strains of TB are significantly harder to treat, with some areas not having […]
Earlier this year, Dr Soumya Swaminathan – director of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) – was appointed Deputy Director General (DDG) of programmes at the World Health Organization (WHO). Health Issues India has interviewed Dr Swaminathan, about the progress made in public health, both in India and on the global level, and what she […]
India is host to huge numbers of tropical diseases, predispositions to genetic disease, as well as many rare conditions that as of yet remain largely unstudied. With endless reports of outbreaks of infectious disease as well as fears of vector borne conditions such as the Zika virus arriving in the country it is understandable to […]
