After the scheme to provide door-to-door contraceptives showed encouraging results, the government has now decided to rope in Accredited Social Health Activists (Asha) to motivate couples delay having children.

With an aim to lay emphasis on spacing rather than limiting, the health ministry has decided to utilise its 8 lakh 60 thousand Ashas for counselling newly-married couples to ensure spacing of two years after marriage and couples with one child to have spacing of three years after the birth of first child.

Days after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh proposed to launch an integrated health mission to pep up urban health, the Union health ministry has started giving final shape to the `17,000-crore National Urban Health Mission.

Senior officials in the health ministry revealed that EFC note has been finalised and will be circulated this week. The NUHM aims to benefit the urban poor in seven metros and 772 cities with a population of more than 50,000.

India has decided that antibiotics should not be used at any stage of honey production, thereby conforming with the norms of European Union.

The recommendation of the Food Safety and Standards of India (FSSAI) will soon be notified by the Union health ministry which will make mandatory for the producers that honey samples conform to these regulatory measures before they can be declared safe for the consumption. The government had been working on these standards since last year after it was found that lots, even those sold by top brands, had traces of antibiotics and pesticides in them. The antibiotics are being used by the bee-keeping industry to control diseases in honey bees and to increase the production.

In further evidence that confirms India’s fear of importing polio virus from neighbouring countries, a recent study has revealed that a major chunk of children below three years in Pakistan and Afghanistan are not receiving the oral polio vaccine.

According to the study published in Lancet, experts found a sharp decline in the vaccine coverage from 2008 to 2011. According to Lancet, vaccine coverage in Balochistan, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) and southern Afghanistan saw a significant decrease from 2006 to 2011.

The government is all set to notify new pictorial warning for the tobacco products. A truncated torso with a diseased lung will replace the controversial blurred image that appeared to be resembling England footballer John Terry as pictorial warning on the cigarette packs.

According to a senior official in the health ministry, the image has been approved by the Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and is expected to be notified soon. The manufacturers, officials say, will be given six months time to make changes and come out with the new pictorial warning in their products.

Energy drinks in India will have to strip off their “energy” tag and instead be renamed as “caffeinated beverage”. According to new standards being laid down by the Food Safety and Standards of India (FSSAI), such beverages must also carry a safety warning for consumers stating that such drinks are not recommended for “children, pregnant or lactating women, persons sensitive to caffeine and sportspersons” as well as “no more than two cans to be consumed per day”.

FSSAI decided to tighten rules in the energy-drink sector after health concerns related to the high caffeine content of non-alchoholic, caffeinated drinks were raised almost two years ago. At their recent meeting, the FSSAI finalised the new standards for such drinks.

In a further evidence suggesting that rolling out programme against the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) in India was incorrect, a recent study has said that current data on HPV and cervical cancer incidence in India does not support the claim of the promoters of the vaccine that India had a large burden of cervical cancer.

“Neither the epidemiological evidence nor the current cancer surveillance systems justify general rollout of a HPV vaccination programme either in India or in the two states where Path was conducting its research,” the study published in the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine cited.

The recent act of Taliban blocking polio vaccination drive in Waziristan has had the health authorities in India worried. While India has not reported any polio case for over a year now, the cross border polio importation threatens India’s success over crippling polio virus.

Given the incredible success, recently, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has put India off the list of polio endemic countries, leaving Pakistan, Nigeria and Afganistan in the list of endemic countries.

The government is planning to make cancer a “notifiable disease”, which will mean every case will have to be reported. Till now infectious diseases like polio, plague, H1N1, H5N1 (bird flu) figure in the list of notifiable diseases. Recently, tuberculosis was made a notifiable disease. Cancer would become the first non-communicable disease to be included in the same category.

Officials in the Union health ministry disclosed that government is seriously considering to make cancer a notifiable disease and the decision in this regard will be taken very soon.

A third of malaria drugs used around the world to keep the spread of the disease at bay are counterfeit, recent data has suggested. According to a study published in the reputed journal the Lancet, around 7 per cent of the drugs tested in India was found to be of poor quality with many being fake.

Researchers who looked at 1,500 samples of seven malaria drugs from seven countries in Southeast Asia said poor-quality and fake tablets are causing drug resistance and treatment failure. “Much of this morbidity and mortality could be avoided if drugs available to patients were efficacious, high quality, and used correctly,” said the Lancet.