Screening for auditory impairment in resource-poor countries

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A TALE OF TWO GLOBAL HEALTH PROGRAMS Smallpox Eradication's Lessons for the Antipolio Campaign in India

India provided one of the most challenging chapters of the worldwide smallpox eradication program. The campaign was converted from a project in which a handful of officials tried to impose their ideas on a complex health bureaucracy to one in which its components were constantly adapted to the requirements of a variety of social, political, and economic contexts. This change, achieved mainly through the active participation of workers drawn from local communities in the 1970s, proved to be a momentous policy adaptation that contributed to certification of smallpox eradication in 1980. However, this lesson appears to have been largely forgotten by those currently managing the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. We hope to show ways in which contemporary efforts to eliminate polio worldwide might profitably draw on historical information, which can indicate meaningful ways in which institutional adaptability is likely to help counter the political and social challenges being encountered in India

Public report on health: Development of a nutritive value calculator for Indian foods and analysis of food logs and nutrient intake in 6 states

The Public Report on Health (PRoH) was initiated in 2005 to understand public health issues for people from diverse backgrounds living in different region specific contexts. States were selected purposively to capture a diversity of situations from better-performing states and not-so-well performing states. Based on these considerations, six states - the better-performing states of Tamil Nadu (TN), Maharashtra (MH) and Himachal Pradesh (HP) and the not-so-well performing states of Madhya Pradesh (MP), Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Orissa (OR) - were selected. This is a report of a study using food diaries to assess food intakes in sample households from six states of India. Method: Food diaries were maintained and all the raw food items that went into making the food in the household was measured using a measuring cup that converted volumes into dry weights for each item. The proportion consumed by individual adults was recorded. A nutrient calculator that computed the total nutrient in the food items consumed, using the 'Nutritive Value of Indian Foods by Gopalan et al., was developed to analyze the data and this is now been made available as freeware (http://bit.ly/ncalculator). The total nutrients consumed by the adults, men and women was calculated. Results: Identifying details having been removed, the raw data is available, open access on the internet http://bit.ly/foodlogxls.The energy consumption in our study was 2379 kcal per capita per day. According to the Summary Report World Agriculture the per capita food consumption in 1997-99 was 2803 which is higher than that in the best state in India. The consumption for developing countries a decade ago was 2681 and in Sub-Saharan Africa it was 2195. Our data is compatible in 2005 with the South Asia consumption of 2403 Kcal per capita per day in 1997-99. For comparison, in industrialized countries it was 3380. In Tamil Nadu it was a mere 1817 kcal. Discussion: The nutrient consumption in this study suggests that food security in the villages studied is far from achieved. It is hoped that the new Food Security Ordinance will make a dent in the situation. The calculator for computing nutrients of foods consumed which we developed based on the ICMR defined nutrient values for Indian foods has been made available as freeware on the internet. This is with the hope that more such studies can be carried out at the household level