India’s food production sector has been banned from using the antibiotic colistin, over concerns about its misuse potentially fuelling drug resistance. According to a 2009 study, “colistin is…being used increasingly as a ‘last-line’ therapy to treat infections caused by [multi-drug-resistant] Gram-negative bacteria, when essentially no other options are available.” Yet concerns are growing that, in […]
Tuberculosis
Disease profile: Tuberculosis in India
Tuberculosis (TB) presents a significant challenge to India’s healthcare system. Though political will to eliminate the condition is high, there are a number of hurdles that must be overcome to attain that goal. Prevalence of tuberculosis Estimating the true prevalence of the condition is difficult within India. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported last year […]
TB cases fly under the radar in Pune
In Pune, there are 6,771 registered healthcare facilities. A mere 38 of them report cases of tuberculosis (TB). The health department of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) reported the shocking finding in its latest report, covering hospitals, private establishments, healthcare clinics, chemists, nursing homes, and diagnostic centres according to The Times of India (ToI). This […]
The threat of lung cancer – and the diagnostic treatment which offers hope
Lung cancer has emerged as a dominant public health threat in India, experts warn. One procedure offers a diagnostic hope in the fight against the disease. Every year, two million Indians are affected by the disease, which accounts for 7.5 percent of the overall cancer burden in the country and ten percent of cancer-related deaths. […]
World TB Day: Will India show leadership in the fight against TB?
“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 […]
How Mumbai fares in the fight against TB
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 […]
The global fight for a TB-free India
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 […]
Uttarakhand makes vaccination a must for schoolchildren
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 […]
Hospital acquired tuberculosis, employees unsafe?
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 […]
India’s health check: It’s bad news
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 […]