On 9 October 2013, an Indian newspaper reported that over 4000 babies died due to a lack of acute medical care because of an electricity failure in the region now known as Seemandhra. The electricity workers were on strike and this had plunged the region into a blackout that started on 8 October and ultimately […]
Category: South Asia
B L Himabindu and N S Prashanth: Can we count on our counting systems?
Basic demographic information forms the basis of policy, planning, and public discourse. The system through which governments record vital events such as births and deaths is the civil registration system. Defined by the United Nations as “the continuous, permanent, compulsory, and universal recording of the occurrence and characteristics of vital events,” it forms the basis […]
Ravi Murugesan: Open access and academic blogging
I’m not a social scientist, so it was with some anxiety that I travelled halfway across the world to attend the World Social Science Forum. The theme, “social transformations and the digital age,” gave me some hope. I teach online and I’m a telecommuter, so I thought as a person of the digital age I […]
Veena Rao: Forging a link between agriculture and nutrition in the Karnataka Nutrition Mission, India
In India, where at least 50% of the population is undernourished and anaemic, any comprehensive strategy to address the problem requires every possible intervention, including the most logical, but elusive step of linking agriculture to nutrition. This linkage has been a substantive part of the international and national discourse on undernutrition for several decades. It […]
Jett Aislabie: Airport noise and cardiovascular disease
Last week we published a cluster of papers on airport noise and cardiovascular disease. One US based study found a statistically significant association between exposure to aircraft noise and risk of hospitalisation for cardiovascular diseases among older people living near airports, and another found that high levels of aircraft noise were associated with increased risks […]
Richard Smith: Moving from global heath 3.0 to global health 4.0
Global health 1.0 was called tropical medicine and was primarily concerned with keeping white men alive in the tropics. Global health 2.0 was called international health and comprised clever people in rich countries doing something to help people in poor countries. It had Cold War overtones. Global health 3.0, which is still the main manifestation […]
Veena Rao: The link between agriculture and nutrition in India
Agriculture is intrinsic to nutrition. It is like stating the obvious—and no formal education or training is required to see the linkage. But the simplicity ends here. While “agriculture” is universally understood by everyone, “nutrition,” and “malnutrition,” are not that clearly understood by many, including the well informed. The subject might provide a feast for […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—23 September 2013
NEJM 19 Sep 2013 Vol 369 1106 I’m starting with the second paper about colonic cancer screening in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, because it takes us to one of the places where it first began: the state of Minnesota. Up there, just under Canada and just west of the Great Lakes, 46,551 […]
David Payne: Open House London’s healthy buildings
Akerman—a £12.3m community healthcare building designed by the architectual practice Henley Halebrown Rorrison—opened last year as part of the regeneration of Myatts Field North in the south London borough of Lambeth. Sandwiched between homes and a local park, the bold white building stretches for 80m and, according to its architects, was designed to mimic the flat […]
Tessa Richards: Lifting the lid on information and learning from it
Progress. The march towards giving patients online access to their medical records is accelerating. The Society of Participatory Medicine has put out the bunting in welcome to the announcement by the OpenNotes initiative that 1.8 million more US patients can see and share full versions of their doctor’s notes; and that big US providers, including […]