In India, a country with a vast population and a diverse socio-economic fabric, healthcare remains fraught with challenges including disparities in access. These socio-economic disparities are deep, and they influence health outcomes. It is imperative to bridge these gaps amid the ongoing epidemiological, nutritional and demographic transitions that are bringing …
It has all the ingredients of a thriller novel. Big bucks, dirty politics, powerful organisations, wily strategy, secret documents, and gullible victims all over the world succumbing to lung cancer. Isolated voices of injured smokers against a powerful tobacco front are ruthlessly drowned but eventually an echo is created as …
FINE KILL The health effect of ULTRAFINE particles - smaller than 0.1 micron in diameter - on human health was never properly studied. Epidemiological studies done till now only linked the effects of these particles on respiratory diseases not death. A German study sponsored by the Health Effects Institute has …
A study shows that 7.5-10 per cent of males in Delhi suffer from various respiratory diseases. Another says that 10 per cent suffer from breathlessness and their lung function is way below the expected levels. One study from Bangalore records the shooting up of asthma in tune with vehicular population …
PACKED off. A stunning US study has clinched the battle of evidence on what tiny particles in the air, mostly emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels do to human health. The industry had refused to admit the mounting scientific evidence that had emerged till now. But this study has …
us government scientists recently changed their stand on the link established in an earlier report between cancer and Agent Orange, used to defoliate jungles during the Vietnam. The revised Institute of Medicine report says there is not enough evidence to prove whether children of Vietnam war veterans have a higher …
Tobacco giant Philip Morris has been ordered by a jury to pay $150 million in punitive damages in a suit filed by the estate of Michele Schwarz, who succumbed to lung cancer after smoking cigarettes of its Merit brand. In an unprecedented verdict, the company was found to have falsely …
radioactive fallout from Cold War nuclear weapons tests throughout the world caused at least 15,000 cancer deaths in the us, revealed a us government study made public recently. The health and human services department study also indicated that 20,000 non-fatal cancers among us residents born after 1951 could be linked …
These factories do not exist in government records. Nor do they figure in the lists of pollution control boards or other regulatory bodies. Even as they have mushroomed in small towns, they are also sprouting in the dark bylanes of congested localities in large cities. They function from one or …
at least 11,000 us citizens died from cancer after being exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear testing done during the Cold War. This was revealed in the report of a recent study conducted by the us Department of Health and Human Services (dhhs). The report further mentions that virtually every …
Scientists have mapped all the genes of the fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe), which they hope will provide new insights into basic cell biology. An international team led by Paul Nurse of Cancer Research Centre, the UK, has done the sequencing. S pombe is the sixth organism to have its genome …
canadian scientists have set up a sophisticated computing lab that will help speed up research into diseases like cancer and diabetes. The lab allows researchers to view three-dimensional models of the smallest parts of the human biological makeup. The results are so realistic that one cannot resist reaching out to …
the European Commission has given its go-ahead to imposing restrictions by 2003 on the public use of 43 chemicals which could cause cancer, damage reproduction or pose a danger to human genes. These gender-bending chemicals are compounds used in special paints, printing inks, varnishes, pesticides, detergents and adhesives. "The commission …
Up to 20 per cent of women with inherited breast cancer have a mutation in the gene that is responsible for repairing damage by radiation therapy. A team, comprising Australian and German researchers, recently found two key mutations in the gene called ATM. "If one copy of the mutated non-functioning …
some brain tumours may be caused by a common virus, indicates a new study conducted by researchers of the Philadelphia-based Temple University. During their study, they analysed a particular type of tumour called medulloblastoma. The tumour is the most common type of malignancy found in the brains of children across …
What is the general understanding of the term ‘pesticides’? In the Asian and South Asian countries, people often term pesticides as ‘medicines’. I have heard this in the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and India. This is a wrong notion that the pesticide manu facturers have succeeded in implanting in the minds …
Associations have been found between day-to-day particulate air pollution and increased risk of various adverse health outcomes, including cardiopulmonary mortality. However, studies of health effects of long-term particulate air pollution have been less conclusive. To assess the relationship between long-term exposure to fine particulate air pollution and all-cause, lung cancer, …
A vaccine effective against human papillomaviruses (HPV), which are thought responsible for most cases of cervical and anal cancers, enters clinical trials in Japan this month. If the trial is successful, the vaccine would be the first used to prevent cancer, claim its developers, a group of researchers from the …
"there is no evidence to implicate or exonerate endosulfan as (the) causative factor of the health problems.' It is on this inconclusive note that the Achyuthan committee has summed up its report. The panel had been set up by the Kerala government to analyse the health and environmental effects of …
the death rate in Italy's industrial regions is higher than the less industrial ones, reveals a recent World Health Organisation (who) report. Covering the period from 1990 to 1994, the who study compared death rates in 15 heavily industrialised areas, which account for 20 per cent of Italy's population, against …
A simple blood test might be used successfully to predict the chances of a person contracting lung cancer. Researchers at Columbia University, New York, USA, used blood samples that had been collected 13 years ago and found that people whose white blood cells were damaged were at a higher risk …
