2014 was the year India declared victory over polio. No new cases of polio have been reported in the country since January 2011, a major achievement for a country that, in the early 1990s, had anywhere between 500 and 1,000 children getting paralysed by the disease every day.
But apart from becoming polio-free, India has had little cause to cheer when it comes to health and wellness. The government has ordered that spending on health be cut by almost a fifth, according to a Reuters report, bringing public health expenditure down by about Rs 6,000 crore. As it stands, India’s health spending at 1% of GDP is among the lowest in the world.
The budget cut comes at the end of a year that saw fast-spreading diseases attack different parts of the country – none of them being the dreaded Ebola that is still ravaging West Africa. We also saw the replay of dreadful and avoidable tragedies caused by negligence in the healthcare system.
Japanese Encephalitis
Nearly 1,500 people, most of them children, have died in a particularly nasty outbreak of Japanese encephalitis this year. The disease hit Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Bihar the hardest, especially during the monsoon months of July and August, when the mosquito-borne virus spread rapidly. The cases and deaths in India have more than doubled since 2010.
Antibiotic resistance and the rise of the superbugs
As more and more newborn babies die of bacterial infections, India is being forced to acknowledge that it has a problem of antibiotic resistance. As the New York Times reported in early December, “once-miraculous cures no longer work” as neonatal wards across the country struggle to attend to large numbers of babies with multi-drug resistant infections.
When antibiotic drugs are indiscriminately prescribed and overused, they give rise to new types of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to existing drugs. While this is a global problem, India has it worse because overcrowding and poor sanitation causes these new bacteria and their infections to spread faster. In 2010, researchers discovered a gene called New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1 or simply NDM-1 that dismantles almost every antibiotic used against the bacteria whose DNA it is part of. NDM-1 has now been discovered in other countries, raising the fear of the spread of antibiotic resistance from India to abroad.
HIV/AIDS drug shortage
In September and October this year, India faced a severe shortage of anti-retroviral therapy drugs to treat HIV/AIDS patients and HIV testing kits. The shortage of AIDS drugs caused by slow bureaucratic procedures and delays in payments is a recurring problem in India and the National Aids Control Organisation is used to redistributing essential resources between states. This time around, the problem was so acute that NACO was forced to replace Nevirapine, one of the three drugs that make up the ART cocktail and of which there was a shortage, with another drug called Efavirenz – a shift that could result in a lack of response or unpleasant side-effects in a patient. The drug shortage also stopped NACO from adopting more ambitious World Health Organization guidelines for treatment of the disease.
Mass sterilisation tragedy
Thirteen women died after their surgeries at a sterilisation camp in Bilaspur district in Chhattisgarh on November 12. The doctor who performed those and 70 other tubectomies in a single day at the camp was sacked by the state government. A fact-finding team reported that the surgeries were conducted in unhygienic conditions, where the doctors did not even change gloves between operations, and medicines were adulterated with rat poison. But as Scroll reported, even the inquiry into the incident seemed half-hearted, with the onus of reporting grievances being put on the victims and survivors.
Bird Flu in Kerala
A sudden outbreak of avian influenza in late November in Alappuzha, the “duck capital” of Kerala, resulted in more than 2,70,000 birds being culled. Three lakh people in the state were put under observation in November since the H5N1 bird flu virus can migrate to humans if they come in contact with sick or dead birds or consume infected meat. The state declared that the disease has been contained and lifted restrictions on meat sale and consumption in mid-December.
But apart from becoming polio-free, India has had little cause to cheer when it comes to health and wellness. The government has ordered that spending on health be cut by almost a fifth, according to a Reuters report, bringing public health expenditure down by about Rs 6,000 crore. As it stands, India’s health spending at 1% of GDP is among the lowest in the world.
The budget cut comes at the end of a year that saw fast-spreading diseases attack different parts of the country – none of them being the dreaded Ebola that is still ravaging West Africa. We also saw the replay of dreadful and avoidable tragedies caused by negligence in the healthcare system.
Japanese Encephalitis
Nearly 1,500 people, most of them children, have died in a particularly nasty outbreak of Japanese encephalitis this year. The disease hit Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Assam and Bihar the hardest, especially during the monsoon months of July and August, when the mosquito-borne virus spread rapidly. The cases and deaths in India have more than doubled since 2010.
Antibiotic resistance and the rise of the superbugs
As more and more newborn babies die of bacterial infections, India is being forced to acknowledge that it has a problem of antibiotic resistance. As the New York Times reported in early December, “once-miraculous cures no longer work” as neonatal wards across the country struggle to attend to large numbers of babies with multi-drug resistant infections.
When antibiotic drugs are indiscriminately prescribed and overused, they give rise to new types of disease-causing bacteria that are resistant to existing drugs. While this is a global problem, India has it worse because overcrowding and poor sanitation causes these new bacteria and their infections to spread faster. In 2010, researchers discovered a gene called New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1 or simply NDM-1 that dismantles almost every antibiotic used against the bacteria whose DNA it is part of. NDM-1 has now been discovered in other countries, raising the fear of the spread of antibiotic resistance from India to abroad.
HIV/AIDS drug shortage
In September and October this year, India faced a severe shortage of anti-retroviral therapy drugs to treat HIV/AIDS patients and HIV testing kits. The shortage of AIDS drugs caused by slow bureaucratic procedures and delays in payments is a recurring problem in India and the National Aids Control Organisation is used to redistributing essential resources between states. This time around, the problem was so acute that NACO was forced to replace Nevirapine, one of the three drugs that make up the ART cocktail and of which there was a shortage, with another drug called Efavirenz – a shift that could result in a lack of response or unpleasant side-effects in a patient. The drug shortage also stopped NACO from adopting more ambitious World Health Organization guidelines for treatment of the disease.
Mass sterilisation tragedy
Thirteen women died after their surgeries at a sterilisation camp in Bilaspur district in Chhattisgarh on November 12. The doctor who performed those and 70 other tubectomies in a single day at the camp was sacked by the state government. A fact-finding team reported that the surgeries were conducted in unhygienic conditions, where the doctors did not even change gloves between operations, and medicines were adulterated with rat poison. But as Scroll reported, even the inquiry into the incident seemed half-hearted, with the onus of reporting grievances being put on the victims and survivors.
Bird Flu in Kerala
A sudden outbreak of avian influenza in late November in Alappuzha, the “duck capital” of Kerala, resulted in more than 2,70,000 birds being culled. Three lakh people in the state were put under observation in November since the H5N1 bird flu virus can migrate to humans if they come in contact with sick or dead birds or consume infected meat. The state declared that the disease has been contained and lifted restrictions on meat sale and consumption in mid-December.
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