India has just introduced three new paediatric vaccines to its Universal Immunization Program (UIP), extending protection to its children against deadly and crippling diseases (rotavirus, rubella, and polio through an injectable polio vaccine). With an estimated 27 million children born in India each year, this is an unprecedented policy leap by the new government, which is flexing its muscles. […]
Category: South Asia
The BMJ Today: Explaining telomeres
Telomeres are getting a lot of attention at the moment. At the 64th Nobel laureate meeting in Lindau two weeks ago, Elizabeth Blackburn (who won the 2009 Nobel prize in medicine) drew my attention to the role of telomeres in the cellular aging process. […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—14 July 2014
NEJM 10 July 2014 Vol 371 107 I was very confused by this paper. It describes two trials of three drugs for premenopausal breast cancer with various permutations, and the bottom line is that all the interventions give the same result. Or, if you are a sponsor of the trial, you can report: “In premenopausal […]
Lavanya Malhotra: Sex education in India
The website of India’s health minister, Harsh Vardhan, currently states: “So called ‘sex education’ to be banned. Yoga to be made compulsory.” The media has not been impressed, and controversy rages as health professionals and educators debate the merits of age appropriate sex education in schools. Vardhan has since retracted his original statement, saying: “Crudity and […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—7 July 2014
NEJM 3 July 2014 Vol 371 11 I don’t envy anyone with central lumbar spinal stenosis. The odds of benefit from surgery are slight. The pain can be there all the time and always gets worse on walking, which can limit activity severely. No wonder epidural steroid injections have proved popular. In this study, they […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—30 June 2014
NEJM 26 Jun 2014 Vol 370 2478 Cryptogenic is a good word. It’s up there with “idiopathic” and “pleiotropic” and “diathesis” for covering gross ignorance with a smattering of Greek. “Cryptogenic” sounds as if it was first used to describe the odd symptoms that Superman experienced when exposed to kryptonite. However, its first use was recorded […]
The BMJ Today: Sugar—public enemy number one?
The crackdown on sugar continues. The Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition in the UK has recommended that people reduce their daily consumption of added sugar so that it makes up around 5% of the average dietary energy intake, reports Matthew Limb. As Ian Macdonald, professor of metabolic physiology at Nottingham University and the advisory group’s […]
The BMJ Today: Troubling statistics—and calls for sweeping reforms
The BMJ has published some recent statistics that are more than a bit disconcerting. The first set regard corruption. Surely hard to measure, but “best estimates are that between 10% and 25% of global spend on public procurement of health is lost through corruption,” Anita Jain, Samiran Nundy, and Kamran Abbasi write in an Editorial. In […]
The BMJ Today: Sugar the bogeyman and slim boy fat
I stopped adding sugar to my tea when I was a teenager. Up until then (which was sometime in the mid 1970s), I had been wont to fill the cup with several heaped spoonfuls. I regularly covered my morning Weetabix with a glacier of granulated. And I drank a can of Coca-Cola or Pepsi (not […]
Julian Sheather: Torture, medicine, and the need for an independent eye
In August 2012, Claudia was woken at 3:00 in the morning when soldiers burst into her home in Veracruz City, Mexico. They tied her hands and blindfolded her. They took her to the local naval base where they tortured her: they subjected her to repeated electric shocks, then they wrapped her in plastic, and beat […]