Researchers have located a new malaria-causing parasite — Plasmodium Knowlesi — for the first time in humans in India.

A team of researchers, consisting of Manoj Kumar Das of the National Institute of Malaria Research (NIMR), Shiv S. Singh of G.B. Pant Hospital, Port Blair, Rupesh K. Tyagi and Yagya D. Sharma of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) located the plasmodium in tribal people in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Representatives of five organisations working among the survivors of the Union Carbide gas disaster on Tuesday criticised the working of National Institute for Research in Environmental Health (NIREH) and said the performance of this organisation has been woefully short of meeting the target of benefiting the victims of the 1984 gas disaster.

Addressing a press conference here, representatives of five NGOs working for the gas victims said that NIREH was established as the 31st centre of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on October 11, 2010 with the primary objective of carrying out research to benefit the survivors of the disaster.

India will soon revise its malaria mortality figures, with the new estimates expected to be at least 20 times more than what the health ministry portrays at present.

A 16-member committee of the Indian Council of Medical Research, headed by its former director general Dr Padam Singh Pradhan, has found that the actual number of malaria deaths in India on an average would be around 40,297 — around 40 times higher than present estimates. In a first such admission, India's National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme (NVBDCP) chief Dr AC Dhariwal told TOI that India's malaria mortality figure was definitely much higher than what is officially quoted.