To sensitise principals of all municipal, government, private schools and nodal officers of colleges in the New Delhi Municipal Council area about prevention and containment of vector borne disease, the civic body's health department organised an awareness programme this past week.

About 250 representatives from various school and colleges participated in the programme.

An NDMC official said

As climate change warms up the North East, malaria-causing mosquitoes threaten to open the disease

In 2005, a strain of the Chikungunya virus that arose in east Africa spread to the islands of Comoros, Mayotte, Seychelles and Reunion in the south-western Indian Ocean.

Later that year, the virus began to cause large-scale outbreaks in India.

The oral single drug formulation of Artemisinin, having potential to become resistant to malaria, has been withdrawn from India. However, some manufacturers continue to produce and export it as a mono therapy.

MUMBAI: Mumbai's ignominious reputation as the state's malaria capital got cemented further as new figures revealed that the city registered nearly 55% of Maharashtra's 1.38 lakh positive cases in 2010-11, pushing it into the league of the country's worst affected states.

Nearly 80,000 cases in Greater Mumbai tested positive for malaria between April 2010 and March 2011, according to statistics

The MCD has made it mandatory for all 33 sentinel surveillance hospitals to report all dengue and chikungunya cases online to do away with the problem of under-reporting of cases.

The nodal officers of the hospitals have been trained to report the cases online, said an MCD official.

All the hospitals and other health service providers would be given a unique password to login and update the

London: In a cramped London laboratory filledwithtesttubes,bacteria and mosquitoes, scientists are trying to engineer a new weapon in the battle against malaria: a mutant fungus.

For years, Angray Kang at Westminster University and colleagues
have been testing whether they could genetically tweak a fungus to kill the malaria parasite carried by mosquitoes.

Experts worldwide might well have concluded that H1N1 has run its course , but closer home the deadly virus continues to take its toll.