Health

Plans are afoot to celebrate the birth of a girl on October 31 as the world’s 7 billionth child near Lucknow, the capital of India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh. Plan International is using the occasion to draw world attention to India’s growing gender gap. The world’s emerging economic superpower, estimated to overtake China to become the most populous nation by 2030, has 7 million girls ‘missing’ from its population. Hundreds of thousands of female foetuses are terminated in India...

Last month, chemists in many states went on a day’s strike to protest against some proposed norm about the sale of antibiotics. Not many cared about it. The issue at hand, however, deserved more serious attention. It concerns the lives of one and all. The grounds for chemists to shut down shop was the government’s reported move to check over-the-counter sale of antibiotics, and to make prescriptions compulsory for selling such drugs. The government ostensibly wants to control the menace of...

Exorbitant medical bills are pushing over 100 million people into poverty every year. In some countries, 5 percent of the population is forced into poverty every year because they have to pay for health services. The findings are from the World Health Organization's World Health Report 2010 which has just been released. The WHO report says that in countries like India people who pay for their health care services suffer "catastrophic costs." While millions suffer and die because they do not have...

An epidemic, suspected to be malaria, has killed dozens of people of the Yanomami tribe in the Venezuelan Amazon. Leaders of the three villages told health workers that around 50 people have died so far, many of them children. "There are still many, many sick people," Andres Blanco told the Associated Press (AP) over telephone from Puerto Ayacucho in southern Venezuela. Blanco, a Yanomami health worker in a government program for the indigenous communities, alerted regional officials this month...

Hindustani classical vocals and Western classical singing, such as the music of Puccini, Mozart and Wagner, vary greatly in technique and sound. Now, speech-language pathology researchers at the University of Missouri are comparing the two styles in hopes of finding a treatment for laryngeal tremors, a vocal disorder associated with many neurological disorders that can result in severe communication difficulties. Sound is developed in the larynx, an organ located in the neck. A laryngeal or...

British scientist Robert Edwards, who helped revolutionise the treatment of human infertility, has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has announced. Edwards, 85, won the prestigious prize for his work on in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), which has helped millions of infertile couples to have a child. "His contributions represent a milestone in the development of modern medicine," the Nobel Assembly at the Swedish...

US First Lady Michelle Obama will be taking a leading role in a new health campaign by Walt Disney Company aimed at getting children to adopt healthier lifestyles, the entertainment conglomerate has announced. The multimedia initiative, to be called Disney Magic of Healthy Living, will include stars from the Disney Channel like Nick Jonas and Brenda Song showcasing what the company statement described as "fun, easy ways that healthy living practices can be woven into the fabric of everyday life...

African-American seniors are twice as likely to be mistreated than elders of other races. They are five times more susceptible to being swindled, the first population-based survey on the psychological abuse of senior citizens in the US has found. Reporting the survey results in The Gerontologist journal, University of Pittsburgh researchers have called for health care and social service workers to be especially vigilant for the possible mistreatment of African American seniors. The survey is...

Over 90 percent surveyed workers believe it is the employer‟s responsibility to create a healthy working environment, and a third feel their workplace actually hinders their ability to lead a healthy lifestyle, according to the World Heart Federation. The findings are from a survey released on Sunday on occasion of World Heart Day, the largest global awareness campaign on heart disease and stroke. The survey, conducted by Opinion Health for the federation, compared responses from employees...

People in OECD countries are becoming fatter by the day. One in two people is now overweight or obese in almost half of OECD countries. Rates are projected to increase further and in some countries two out of three people will be obese within ten years. The findings are from a new report of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which examines the current obesity epidemic, giving new comparative data, trends and projections across OECD countries and outlining causes and...