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. …
Notice to Coke: The Supreme Court (SC), on May 6, 2005, issued a notice to multinational soft drinks company Coca-Cola on a plea of Kerala's Perumatty grama panchayat, which sought an order to stop Coca-Cola from drawing 0.5 million litres of groundwater daily for its Plachimada bottling unit. The permission …
cocoa harms: Cocoa-based chocolates have higher contents of harmful heavy metals (lead, cadmium and nickel) than milk-based chocolates and fruit flavour-based or sugar-based candies, according to a recent study at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Trombay, Mumbai. The researchers led by Sudhir Dahiya looked at 69 brands of chocolates and …
celebrity endorsement is tricky business, and there is an old debate about its use. But it gets trickier when the endorsement is meant to serve a larger public good. The United Nations Children's Fund (unicef) has, for long, used goodwill ambassadors. Here is how the organisation explains this: " unicef …
The United Nations Children's Fund's intervention in West Bengal's Purulia district has shown encouraging results in checking the incidence of maternal and child mortality. The agency has documented its initiative through photographs highlighting some aspects of the problem and measures taken to prevent them. THE United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) …
A ngola is in the grip of the worst recorded outbreak of the rare Marburg disease. By March 31, 2005, 130 people, three fourths of them children, had died and the country's four provinces affected. In the last known biggest Marburg outbreak, 123 people had died in the Democratic Republic …
a serious question mark has been raised on the quality of baby products manufactured by multinational Johnson and Johnson (j&j;). The Mumbai-based Food and Drug Administration (fda) has detected that the j&j; baby oil has light liquid paraffin (mineral oil) as its base. Mineral oil cannot be absorbed by the …
Children in parts of Siberia near the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan are suffering serious health problems due to pollution caused by unburned rocket fuel. This fuel is sprayed by rockets launched at the cosmodrome, used by the Russian space agency Rosaviakosmos, the European Space Agency (esa) and the us- based …
babies born via a caesarean operation are prone to various health problems, says research conducted by B Laubereau and co-workers from the Institute of Epidemiology, Germany. They studied 865 neonates who were breast-fed during their first four months. Data were obtained by follow-up visits when the babies were 1, 4, …
Malnutrition petition: In a suo moto petition taking cognisance of the increasing number of child deaths in Maharashtra's tribal areas, the Bombay High Court has ruled that there are inherent flaws in government's policy on malnutrition; these should be addressed before it offers any solution. Condemning government's failure on this …
The objectives of the study were to study the relationships of insulin resistance with generalized and abdominal obesity, and body fat patterning in urban postpubertal Asian Indian children.
start telling stories: Being a maths wizard and a great storyteller may appear completely different, but a new study by Canada's University of Waterloo suggests that preschool children's storytelling abilities are predictive of their mathematical ability. In the study, children aged three and four were shown a book that contained …
Shankar Sharma, vice-chairman of National Planning Commission (NPC) of Nepal, recently admitted that the country would be unable to achieve the Millennium Development Goals if the Maoist activity was not curbed immediately. This is the first such statement by a senior government official. According to government estimates, nearly two-thirds of …
faced with fervent censure in the us, Kellogg Company has decided to withdraw its Spiderman toys "Spidey Signals' fitted with mercury batteries, which were distributed in its sugared cereal boxes. The toy was a promotion for the movie Spiderman ii. The company also announced its resolve to never use mercury …
Health authorities in the Chinese city of Guiyang are recalling nearly 9,000 bags of milk powder. In early June, over 150 children in the southwestern province of Guizhou were poisoned by the product. Tests showed that it contained golden staphylococcus toxin, which causes heart fever, and even death. A similar …
People in the us, especially children, women and Mexican Americans, carry dangerously high levels of pesticides in their bodies, according to a recent study. Many of these toxic chemicals have serious health effects: cancers, infertility and birth defects. The study also zeroes in on companies responsible for the population's high …
the discovery of a malaria parasite protein associated with severe a childhood form of the disease could help save thousands of lives. The protein has been found by researchers from Denmark-based University of Copenhagen, uk-based London School of Tropical Hygiene, Tanzania-based National Institute for Medical Research, and the Netherlands based …
