Good Food is First Food. It is not junk food. It is the food that connects nature and nutrition with livelihoods. This food is good for our health; it comes from the rich biodiversity of our regions; it provides employment to people. Most importantly, cooking and eating give us pleasure. …
THE EXORBITANT price of the life-saving, anti-coagulant drug, Acetrome, is enough to give heart patients a cardiac arrest. Between January 1991 and January 1993, the price of a strip of 10 4-mg Acetrome tablets jumped 1,000 per cent from Rs 5.80 to Rs 59.50, effectively putting it out of reach …
THE SUPREME Court is set to cover new ground in medical litigation when it considers an appeal by doctors contesting their inclusion within the purview of the Consumer Protection Act (COPRA), 1986. Doctors of the Cosmopolitan Hospital in Thiruvananthapuram were charged with medical negligence in September 1989, when G P …
A REVOLUTION is taking place in medical immunology with the discovery of a method to produce monoclonal antibodies, which offer a powerful and less toxic treatment for diverse diseases, from cancer to rheumatoid arthritis, than most available drugs (British Medical Journal, Vol 340, Nos 6864-6). In the mid-1970s, a group …
COMMUNITY participation can work wonders when it comes to tackling diseases too recalcitrant to be curbed effectively by medical science alone. A fine example of this can be found in the Shertallai region in central Kerala, where the Pondicherry-based Vector Control Research Centre (VCRC) successfully involved the people in an …
SCIENTISTS at Cambridge University's Department of Pathology have found an effective way of treating patients with long-standing rheumatoid arthritis, using "humanised monoclonal antibodies". Produced from animal cells, monoclonal antibodies are designed to order and can kill unwanted cells. Mainly used to treat cancer, these antibodies are now being used to …
NEW FORMS of nutritional diseases can appear with environmental change, warns C Gopalan, former ICMR director-general. Increased use of chemical fertilisers with intensive cropping results is steadily depleting the soil of micronutrients such as sulphur, iron, manganese, zinc and cop- per. A majority of soils and crops in Andhra- Pradesh, …
INDIA has shown commendable achievements in health and nutrition in the past 40 years and C Gopalan, former"director-general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, considers the "most outstanding achievement" to be the virtual banishment of large-scale famine. In a study recently released by the World Health Organisation (WHO), entitled …
MANY southeast Asian countries, including India, have been able to control several nutritional diseases such as kwashiorkor, beriberi and pellagra. Kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition caused by protein deficiency, is especially prevalent among children. Pellagra, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamins found in milk, liver and yeast, is …
A LOW-COST AIDS test is now being manufactured in India. The test, known as the HIV Dipstick, was developed by the Programme for Appropriate Technology in Health, a US-based, non-profit agency, and does not require very complicated equipment, refrigeration or technicians to operate it. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that …
Finally, France's former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius, secretary of state for health Edmund Herve and social affairs minister Georgina Dufoix are to be tried in a parliamentary court in the AIDS scandal currently rocking the nation. In 1985, when Fabius was prime minister, 1,000 haemophiliacs were given a blood …
SCIENCE may have conquered smallpox, but as far as AIDS is concerned, education may be a better weapon. According to WHO estimates, there are 10 million people infected with the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) worldwide. Two-thirds of the infected persons live in developing countries, of which three million are …
AIDS is a a disease that has no cure and this is forcing health workers to seek effective ways to prevent its spread. The experiences of the decade since the discovery of AIDS indicate strategies to change social attitudes and behaviour have limited the spread of the disease. Many grassroots …
IF LIVING proof is needed of how institutions created by human beings for their welfare really work, one has only to go to Bhopal, where thousands succumbed in a deadly MIC gas leak on the night of December 2-3 in 1984. Eight years later, apathy, arrogance and greed still prevail …
Katchi abadis (illegal squatter colonies) are a common feature in Pakistan's rapidly expanding cities. Karachi alone has 362 such colonies, housing more than 3 million people -- about 40 per cent of the city's population. These settlements have sprung up since the 1970s as a result of immigration from rural …
TUBERCULOSIS, the number one killer in India -- two million cases of active TB are diagnosed each year -- and the AIDS epidemic are showing a disturbing tendency of coalescing and infecting the same individual (WorldAIDS, No 23). The risk groups of both diseases overlap in many countries in the …
A TUSSLE over registration procedures for two new kinds of pesticides that could form the cornerstone of India's malaria eradication programme has ended, but the question of which one will be used is likely to be decided only much later, and this is adversely affecting the malaria eradication programme. The …
A study in rural Bangladesh has found victims of watery diarrhoea treated with rice-based oral rehydration solution (rice-ORS) recover faster and require fewer hospitalisations than those treated otherwise (Glimpse Newsletter, Vol 14 No 4). Rice gruel has traditionally been used to treat diarrhoea. Packaged rice-ORS and glucose-ORS were supplied to …
WHEN I WAS a child, illnesses in traditional Indian families were not remembered as connected with germs, but with events and the suprarational. One heard that at a marriage, somebody's third son broke out with the measles and somebody's aunt sprained her ankle in her anxiety to catch a glimpse …
A NON-GOVERNMENTAL report on the state of India's health has expressed concern that environment impact assessments of development programmes almost always ignore their effect on people's health. "What is important is that infrastructural projects that are sanctioned -- even after impact assessment -- might even be increasing morbidity (illness) or …
THE CONCEPT that caring for AIDS patients in their homes because it is both medically sound and basically humane is being carried out quite successfully since the late 1980 in African countries such as Uganda and Zambia. In the health-care programmes of these countries, the aim is to provide a …
