Health

For the last ten years, Sunita Sutar has been looking after the well-being of slum dwellers near Bandra (West) railway station. From September 26th to October 12th, Sutar and nearly 4,000 Community Health Workers (CHW) like her were on the ground conducting door-to-door tuberculosis and leprosy survey for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation's (BMC) health department. The survey is part of India’s plan to eliminate TB and leprosy by 2025 and 2030 respectively. It covered over 49 lakh people in 9 lakh houses across 24 wards under BMC. "When this area was initially assigned to me, it was difficult to navigate.…

37-year-old Nitin has been a tobacco user for more than 10 years. Last month, he was swinging between life and death in Parel’s King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital after suffering from a heart attack. “I was experiencing pain in my chest, I was unable to breathe. They performed CPR when I reached KEM. I underwent angioplasty and was admitted for a week,” says Nitin, who works as a private driver in Mumbai. The city witnessed a jump in heart-attack cases in the first six months of 2021 as a total of 17,880 lost their lives to it. Nearly 3,000 died every month; in…

The Singh family in Ghaziabad didn’t pay much attention when their 62-year-old father suddenly began to struggle to find the right words or remember the names of friends. He had loved travelling, but he stopped travelling and even avoided meeting friends and relatives. The family put it all down to age-related idiosyncrasy. Dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease wasn’t something that crossed their minds at that point. Mr Singh passed away within a span of one year. He had frontotemporal dementia.  “We thought that retirement and COVID lockdown had made him irritated and stress was the culprit,” says Mrs Nath, wife of…

The Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) unearthed a major milk adulteration racket operating from Dharavi recently, on September 15th. The accused were found slitting the milk packets and removing the milk. They replaced it with water before sealing the cut part with candle flame. The FDA officials seized and destroyed about 807 litres of adulterated milk worth Rs 45, 852. The FDA launched criminal proceedings in a joint operation with the Shahu Nagar police station. A milk adulteration racket busted at Dharavi during a joint operation raid by the FDA and the Mumbai police. Pic courtesy: FDA In another instance,…

The slow but certain deterioration of cognitive functions that comes with the onset of Alzheimer's Disease is unimaginable for most. We are rooted in a culture where it is simply assumed that a sick person can rely heavily on family or relatives and is entitled to a certain amount of help and benefits. While it might get uncomfortable getting into the details of a caregiving role, these are important aspects to consider and discuss from the very beginning. Setting up personal boundaries are extremely important in order to safeguard mental and physical health of patients and caregivers as well. It…

In late August, Deepak Khilare, 40, undertook a 12-hour journey of 600 km with his family of five, including his aged father and a 10-year-old son, to visit Mumbai's King Edward Memorial (KEM) hospital from his hometown Nanded. A daily wage labourer, Deepak had sustained an injury while working at a construction site a month ago. This caused trauma to his spine and impaired his leg functions. The family first admitted him to a private hospital, but little improvement in his condition and dwindling savings forced them to move him to KEM. The fact that Deepak's relative was admitted there…

If you have friends and family in other parts of India, you may hear them say, “It is too hot and humid there. I do not want to come to Chennai.” Well, Chennai's heat and humidity may not tempt tourists, but it is certainly attractive enough for tuberculosis (TB) bacteria to thrive.  With climate change staring the city in its face, the risks Chennai runs are not just environmental but have far-reaching implications on health. Could climate change also lead to an explosion of TB cases in the city? How can we protect ourselves from such possibilities? When does TB…

Each suicide is a personal tragedy that prematurely claims the life of an individual and has a continuing ripple effect, affecting the lives of families, friends and communities. Every year, more than one lakh deaths by suicide are recorded in India. A total of 1,64,033 suicides were recorded in 2021 alone. The recent data released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) highlights that Chennai stands second among the metropolitan cities in the country with an alarmingly high number of suicides in 2021. The data shows that Tamil Nadu stands second among the states with highest number of suicides in…

If “vomiting” is the first remedial action that strikes you in an imagined event of poisoning, it may not be the correct approach in most cases. So, what is to be done if somebody ingests poison unknowingly or intentionally? Unfortunately, there is not much awareness of what constitutes poisoning and the correct response to it among the general public and even among doctors. The World Health Organisation estimates that, in 2016, unintentional poisoning caused 106683 deaths and the loss of 6.3 million years of healthy life (disability-adjusted life years). According to a paper published in the Lancet Global Health in…

"I used to crave street food as a teenager. I frequently had lunches and dinners from roadside vendors for more than 5 years," said Shruti, a resident of KK Nagar. A few years ago she suffered from food poisoning due to one such meal and had to miss her college semester exams. "That was when it hit me how unhealthy street food in Chennai could be." How does Chennai's street food scene fare on food safety and hygiene? What should you look out for the next time you decide to treat yourself to some scrumptious roadside chaat or bajjis on…