Global health leaders will gather in Abu Dhabi on 24 and 25 April for a vaccine summit to discuss recent accomplishments and seek ways to expand the impact of childhood vaccination under the decade of vaccines (DoV), an initiative for collective action announced by Bill Gates at the 2010 World Economic Forum. Promoting greater affordability […]
Category: South Asia
Richard Lehman’s journal review—22 April 2013
JAMA 17 Apr 2013 Vol 309 1607 Why do some babies get colic every evening until they are about three months old? Dunno. Why do some children and adolescents get migraine? Dunno. Connect the two dunnos and you get a third—why are children and adolescents who get migraine six times more likely to have a […]
Damien Brown: Working for MSF in South Sudan
My second day in South Sudan, the start of a nine month posting with MSF in this war torn, dustbowl of a town called Nasir, and I’m standing here in the medical ward, utterly lost. In every sense of the word. How did previous doctors manage the workload out here? I’ve got no idea. In […]
Saurabh Gupta: Are doctors perpetual soft targets?
I recently read an article about a study in the US journal Demography on skewed sex ratios prevalent in India among the children of doctors. It mentioned that out of a sample of doctor couples (946 nuclear families with 1,624 children), the child sex ratio was 907 girls per 1 000 boys. This is below the Indian […]
Readers’ editor blog: Our Indian readers, and why there’s more of them
At the beginning of 2013 bmj.com’s most accessed article in India typically received between 100 and 200 views. In three months the figure has more than doubled. In the first full week of January there were 9,784 visits to bmj.com from India. The figure has been rising since. Last week there were 12,121. In November 2012 […]
Soumyadeep Bhaumik on a national snake bite survey in India
In January when I wrote a BMJ feature titled ” Snakebite: a forgotten problem,” little did I know that just two months down the line I would be part of something that will help change the lives of millions of marginalised people who are affected by a problem that is still neglected by policy makers, […]
B Ramana: Have health budgets changed much for India?
Last week India’s Union budget was passed by the Union finance minister P. Chidambaram. It was met with mixed reactions by markets and pundits. As a healthcare professional interested in the general health of India, I found myself getting straight to the section on health in the finance minister’s speech. The minister started off by […]
Anant Bhan and Bhavna Dhingra: We need a comprehensive approach to women’s health in India
It has been a winter of discontent regarding the status of women in India, sparked by national outrage following the gruesome gang rape of a young trainee physiotherapist in Delhi. The spontaneous public protests have highlighted the need for reform to promote a gender-equitable society. Today, as we observe International Women’s Day, we also need […]
Jacob Puliyel on the All India centralised entrance test
Final year medical students in the UK currently face an uncertain future as they wait to find out what foundation school place they have been allocated following the muddled “situational judgement test” (SJT). They can take cold comfort in the fact that at least they do not have to do the All India Centralised Entrance […]
Jeremy Hill: Teaching family medicine in Bangalore
“Please come to Bangalore” was the invitation. In my day job I am a British general practitioner with special interests in dermatology and medical education—so what was I doing teaching family medicine trainees in Karnataka? The “Resolve more, refer less” initiative was started by Vinod Shah in 2006 and offers a distance learning diploma in […]