Full Coverage: Health

30.10.2006 On an average, more than 400 infants below the age of one die in Bihar on any given day. According to Unicef, nearly two-thirds of infant deaths occur during the first month of the childÂ’s life. Timely intervention could help save these lives, thus reducing the stateÂ’s abysmal infant mortality rate, reveals a survey conducted by the UN childrenÂ’s aid body.

27.10.2006 Dr.Anjana Maitra explores ways in which Information Communication Technology tools can be used to facilitate behavioural change communication for safe motherhood. This paper was presented at a Consultation and Experience Sharing on Safe Motherhood at BITS, Pilani on September 8-9 2006.

24.10.2006 Under the framework of the “Be Part of the Solution, Not the Problem” National Campaign, series of educational and cultural events will be held in Skopje, under the motto “Attention! Prejudice Overdose”. The National Campaign aims to introduce the general public about the problem for reduction of damages and stigmatization and discrimination of drug-abusers and their families.

18.10.2006 The poor - and the not-so-poor - in urban India are also very badly served by this system, which lets them down on so many counts even while forcing them to pay larger shares of their own income on health care. There are public failures in terms of inadequate investment and inefficient regulation. The parlous state and sheer difficulty of access of government hospitals forces even the poor to turn to private practitioners.

16.10.2006

polio vaccination © Crack Palinggi / Reuters / Corbis; permissions through "Rx for Survival"

At one time it was thought that polio had been completely eradicated from Nepal. After an intensive campaign launched several years ago by administering polio drops to children below five years of age throughout the country no cases of new polio cases were reported for a number of years. But now there are reports of some polio cases detected in some places in the country bordering India.

16.10.2006 Mosquito-borne dengue fever has killed at least 17 people in PakistanÂ’s biggest city, Karachi, in the past four months, five of them since the beginning of October.

16.10.2006 Pune will once again come on the global map, this time for its healthcare. Perhaps for the first time in the country, a super specialty hospital dedicated to women and children will be set up in the city.

16.10.2006 A workshop on protocols for neonatal care was held in Kochi, Kerala to streamline the management of second-level care given at hospitals and nursing homes.

16.10.2006 The dengue death toll has crossed 100, even as 161 new cases were reported nationwide. This takes the total number of people affected to 5,036. The Capital registered six deaths during the past 24 hours, the largest number on a single day since the outbreak of the disease.

12.10.2006 Maternal health appears as a pervasive concern within the framework of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). It finds explicit expression in the goals 4 and 5 pertaining to reproductive and child health, child survival and reducing child mortality, reducing maternal mortality rate and increases the proportion of birth attendants by skilled health personnelÂ’s. Goal 5 calls for reducing the rate of maternal mortality by 75 % by 2015.

11.10.2006 The Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) of Nepal will, from next week, start various programmes to check Dengue.
The districts bordering India have a high risk of catching the disease.

11.10.2006 Altogether 800 people lost their lives due to tuberculosis in the year 2062-63 BS in Nepal.

11.10.2006 Some 20,000 people in the town of Balakot in Pakistan which was badly devastated in last OctoberÂ’s 7.6 magnitude earthquake, have been facing a severe shortage of clean water for the last month, according to local authorities.

11.10.2006 Ophthalmologists from the local hospital teamed up with doctors from Bangalore to conduct diabetic retinopathy screenings, Flourescein Angiograms and laser eye surgeries inside the mobile van.

11.10.2006 A community-based approach using biological control rather than insecticides has been successfully adopted in several communes in Vietnam. The same could be effective against the mosquito that spreads the virus causing chikungunya, writes N Gopal Raj.

11.10.2006 With at least 870,000 people killing themselves each year and 450 million others around the world affected by mental, neurological or behavioural problems at any given time, the United Nations today marked World Mental Health Day with calls for greater attention to be afforded to the causes and treatment of suicide.

10.10.2006 Dengue fever continued to spread across India as the toll reached 51.The number of patients suffering from the mosquito-borne disease rose to 3,613, though authorities said there was no need to panic.

10.10.2006 Cases of pneumonia among the children of the Eastern Development Region is on the rise with some 500 children suffering from pneumonia arriving in the Koshi Zonal Hospital.

10.10.2006 At the current rate of decline in the under-5 Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), India is not likely to achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of bringing down the IMR to 40 per 1,000 live births for the year 2015, according to a UNICEF report.

06.10.2006 The United Nations-backed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is expected to approve requests from almost 100 countries for $950 million over two years to support programmes to combat the global scourges that kill over 6 million people annually.