Health

“I was in the fourth standard when I began to see things, hear voices, often my jaw used to get locked. Everything appeared foggy. I used to feel as if I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to break out but couldn’t because it was untouchable. When I shared my thoughts with my mother she just told me not to be frightened and not to listen to those voices. I tried but failed. I shared with my friends they thought I was making it all up and trying to frighten them by narrating ghost stories. As a…

After a gruelling two years of the COVID pandemic, medical teachers from the Grant Medical college in JJ Hospital, Mumbai, went on strike starting January 5th. For over two months, they demanded regularisation of their services and the implementation of the 7th pay commission, which would mean standardised salaries and timely promotions. The situation in medical colleges and hospitals that are run by the Maharashtra government point to discrepancies in budget allocation and implementation for medical colleges, when other central and BMC run hospitals provide better working conditions for medical practitioners and teachers.  The working conditions coupled with the depleting…

Mumbai has had a rough start to the summer. Along with the rest of the country, a heat wave in the city began in March, as the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) Santacruz observatory recorded a temperature of 39.4 degrees Celsius (°C). A lack of pre-monsoon showers and warm, dry winds from northwest India have been the causes, driven by climate change. Another three heat waves followed, when the peak season for them, May, is yet to pass. The high minimum and maximum temperatures have meant that the city has spent the majority of the two months without any respite. This…

Vandana Borse, hailing from Jalgaon, is exhausted from rounds to three hospitals in a day. Her son Prem, 7, underwent surgery for a brain tumour at JJ Hospital in Mumbai in early March. She recounts a two-month-long ordeal starting in January when Prem - a cheerful child, fond of cricket - started showing symptoms like headaches and vomiting. An MRI scan at a local hospital in Jalgaon found that he had a brain tumour. After their doctor recommended a doctor in JJ Hospital for surgery, they made the trip to Mumbai. What they thought was a two-week procedure stretched to…

International sports has been rocked in recent years with a series of top flight athletes, many of them women, quitting tournaments or giving up the game due to emotional or mental health related issues. The most recent being world number one Ashley Barty, 25, who decided to retire from tennis at the height of her prowess. The reason she gave: Her emotional inability to continue the gruelling physical and mental effort that remaining on top in international sports requires.  International sports stars no doubt face unique physical and mental pressures. It happened to Barty’s competitor Naomi Osaka over a year…

Omicron, named by the WHO after the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, continues to fuel the third wave of Covid-19 pandemic in India.  On Jan 20th, the country witnessed a whopping 3.47 lakh cases, the highest in the last eight months. Globally, India is the second worst-hit country after the US.  The Omicron variant, which has over 30 mutations on its spike protein, hit the country at a time when people believed that the pandemic was nearing the end. It has so far been found in 29 states. In fact, Omicron is fast becoming the dominant variant which, experts say, is…

Since the onset of the third wave, a surge in home testing for COVID-19 in Mumbai has brought new challenges for the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC). Mylab Discovery Solutions, the manufacturer of 'CoviSelf', a self-testing kit, which sold about 25,000 kits in Mumbai in December, saw its sales jump to about five lakh on January 7th. By January 11th, 96,000 people in the city had tested themselves using home testing kits. Of these, 3,000 had tested positive according to Mumbai's mayor Kishori Pednekar. And with no rule or law in place at that time making it mandatory for those doing home testing to report…

The first doctor to report the Omicron variant on November 18th, 2021 was Dr Angelique Coetzee, National Chairperson of South African Medical Association. “On that day, I saw seven patients with similar symptoms of myalgia, headache, fatigue who tested positive for COVID-19 with rapid tests at my consulting rooms,” Dr Coetzee said in an email interview with Citizen Matters. “Their symptoms were different from Delta and I alerted the South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on Vaccines of which I am a part. It took our scientists six days to announce to the world that there’s a new variant.”  Subsequently, on…

As Bengaluru continues to record over 25,000 COVID cases per day, how well is the city prepared to deal with the third wave? Does the city have enough hospital beds? Is BBMP able to track and support patients in home isolation? Here's a roundup. In the current wave, a smaller percentage of patients seem to need hospitalisation compared to the second wave last year. However, BBMP Chief Commissioner Gaurav Gupta has emphasised that the rising case count can increase the absolute numbers of people who require hospitalisation, which can lead to a shortage of beds. A BBMP press release on…

The third wave of COVID-19 in Mumbai has mobilised another round of crowdsourcing for hospital beds, akin to the second wave, when citizen action kept the country afloat. Among them, one citizen, Vikram Tuteja claims multiple people have asked him for help in their hunt for ICU beds. Even Iqbal S Chahal, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC)'s commissioner, acknowledged complaints about the shortage of COVID-19 beds in private hospitals. But, the BMC's daily updates have continuously shown ample availability of hospital beds. The percentage of occupied beds has not exceeded 22% (7,500), even when there have been over a lakh active…