Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi are paying special attention to the north-eastern States and all developmental projects will be taken up expeditiously, said Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss. He was addressing the staff of the Regional Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) which had been taken over by the Central government. Mr. Ramadoss was accompanied by Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Panabaka Lakshmi on his two-day visit to Manipur that ended on Wednesday.

If things go as planned, transplantation of liver would be a reality in Kolkata within a couple of months. After Mumbai, Kolkata would be the second city in the country to facilitate transplantation in a state-run hospital at a much cheaper cost.

Who is interested in controlling spiraling drug prices or, for that matter, the skyrocketing healthcare costs? Both are interconnected although healthcare means a total package, of which drugs and pharmaceuticals form an important integral part. For medical treatment, which does not require hospitalization, the cost of drugs often takes a lion's share of the total expenditure incurred by a patient. In the case of surgical intervention, the other costs, including surgeon's fees, expenses on various tests, nursing and hospitalization, etc., could be equally overbearing on a patient's pocket.

KOHIMA

Minister for agriculture, Mr N. Raghuveera Reddy, said the host of welfare schemes being implemented by the state government had given party leaders and even government officials boldness to face people in the month-long Praja Padam programme.

Tamil Nadu enjoys the top slot among the Indian states in providing healthcare. It has a 95 per cent immunisation coverage. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has certified it as a tetanus free state for neonates. No polio case has been reported here in the last four years. Also, there has been no incidence of diphtheria and whooping cough in the state. Yet, it was here that a vaccine

A new Child Development and Nutrition Resource Centre, launched here earlier this week, will provide focused and rapidly usable information and other resources for early child care and development and nutrition for toddlers to promote healthy parenting among young couples and train the resource persons working in the rural areas.

On Oct 17, 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates called for complete eradication to be adopted as the new goal for the age-old fight against malaria, with the Director General of WHO, Margaret Chan, promptly echoing their conviction. Although debate over the wisdom of this target will continue, growing impatience with the low ambitions of current efforts, fuelled by reductions in morbidity and mortality in some countries and progress in the development of new drugs and the first-ever vaccine, will lead many decision makers to adopt eradication of malaria as the primary aim for their organisations.

India is on a high alert against Enterovirus 71 (EV-71), a causative agent for hand-foot-mouth disease (HFMD) that has infected over 20,000 children and killed around 40 of them, in at least four Asian countries over the past three months. China, which has recorded over 15,799 cases of HFMD and 28 deaths, has been the worst affected, followed by Vietnam where 3,000 children have been infected and 10 died. Singapore too has recorded around 10,490 cases while Hong Kong recently isolated the virus from two children.

It has only been two months since the inauguration of the Jiban Jyoti Scheme, prepared for the benefit of the distressed Lodha-Sabars of Belpahari, but it has already flopped.

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