Archive for the 'Health' Category

India, the rent-a-womb capital of the world

Amana Fontanella-Khan in Slate on India’s half-billion-dollar-a-year reproductive-tourism industry:

You can outsource just about any work to India these days, including making babies. Reproductive tourism in India is now a half-a-billion-dollar-a-year industry, with surrogacy services offered in 350 clinics across the country since it was legalized in 2002. The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe. Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less. Very few questions are asked. Same-sex couples, single parents and even busy women who just don’t have time to give birth are welcomed by doctors. As a bonus, many Indians speak English and Indian surrogate mothers are less likely to use illegal drugs. Plus medical standards in private hospitals are very high (not all good Indian doctors left in the brain drain).

Some describe this as a win-win situation. The doctors get clients, the childless get children and the surrogates get much-needed money. But some media horror stories have challenged this happy vision. In 2007 the Japanese couple Ikufumi and Yuki Yamada came to visit India’s “Surrogacy Queen,” Dr. Nayna Patel, founder of the Akanksha Infertility Clinic. A donor egg and surrogate mother was found and the embryo was implanted in the surrogate’s womb. Before the child was born, however, the Yamadas divorced and Mrs. Yamada no longer wanted the child, which was not biologically hers. Mr. Yamada wanted the baby but could not adopt it due to an Indian colonial-era law that forbids single men from adopting girls. The absence of regulation meant that Baby Manji became India’s first “surrogate orphan” until the father was finally able to adopt her several months, after the Supreme Court intervened. Other cases like the Japanese one have followed, involving Israeli, French, and German citizens.

The most shocking stories, however, concern the surrogate mothers. The surrogates, many of whom are cooped up in “surrogacy homes” away from their families for the duration of the pregnancy, are often in dire financial straits. One woman told a journalist that with a $4,000 debt and an alcoholic husband, she had first considered selling a kidney to get herself out of debt, but decided that the $ 7,000 surrogacy fee was the better option. In another disturbing case, an upper-class Indian woman hired a surrogate to carry her child and invited her to live in her home during the pregnancy. The client accused the surrogate mother of stealing and not only kicked her out of the house but coolly informed her that she didn’t want her services anymore and that she should terminate the pregnancy. Surrogates get paid only on delivery of the baby, so this kind of situation is economically devastating for a surrogate. It can also severely compromise the ethical and religious beliefs of surrogates who may not wish to undergo an abortion. More:

Special investigation: The downfall of India’s kidney kingpin

How a self-taught doctor from Delhi cornered the black market in kidneys, building one of the world’s most lucrative organ-trading rings, until it all came crashing down. Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in Discover (via 3quarksdelhi):

Eleni Dagiasi flew from Athens to Delhi in January 2008 on a mission to save her life. With her husband, Leonidas, she took a taxi from the airport past sparkling multiplexes and office buildings to a guesthouse in the booming exurb of Gurgaon. A kitchen staff was on hand, the rooms had cable, and there was a recreation area with billiards, providing patients with creature comforts while kidney transplants were arranged. Over the next week, as her operation was scheduled, Dagiasi went to a makeshift hospital for dialysis. Then one night, while she was watching TV with her husband, a chef turned off the lights and urged everyone to leave. Shortly afterward, 10 policemen stormed in. “We were too stunned to react,” says Leonidas Dagiasis, a former fisherman who borrowed money from his employer to finance the trip. The couple and other guests were hauled off for questioning. The Gurgaon hospital, it turned out, was the hub of a thriving black market in kidneys. The organs were harvested from poor Indian workers, many of whom had been tricked or forced into selling the organ for as little as $300.

The mastermind, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) charged, was Amit Kumar—a man who performed the surgeries with no more formal training than a degree in ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of medicine. In a career spanning two decades, Kumar had established one of the world’s largest kidney trafficking rings, with a supply chain that extended deep into the Indian countryside. Some of his clients were from India. Many came from Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Canada, and the United States.

At parties in India and abroad, Kumar introduced himself as one of India’s foremost kidney surgeons, said Rajiv Dwivedi, a CBI investigator based in Delhi. The claim wasn’t entirely illegitimate: Investigators estimate that Kumar has performed hundreds of successful transplants, a practice so lucrative that he was able to finance Bollywood movies and had to fend off extortion threats from the Mumbai mafia. Two weeks after the police crackdown in Gurgaon, Kumar was arrested at a wildlife resort in Nepal and brought back to India, where he now awaits trial. More:

Indian superbug spurs global alarm

From BBC: A new superbug that is resistant to even the most powerful antibiotics has entered UK hospitals, experts warn. They say bacteria that make an enzyme called NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-ß-lactamase-1) have travelled back with NHS patients who went abroad to countries like India and Pakistan for treatments such as cosmetic surgery.

Although there have only been about 50 cases identified in the UK so far, scientists fear it will go global. Tight surveillance and new drugs are needed says Lancet Infectious Diseases. More:

What is NDM-1?

New Delhi metallo-ß-lactamase-1, or NDM-1 for short, is a gene carried by bacteria that makes the strain resistant to carbapenem antibiotics. This is concerning because these antibiotics are some of the most powerful ones, used on hard-to-treat infections that evade other drugs. More

Click here for Lancet study

From Daily Mail: Dr David Livermore, director of antibiotic resistance monitoring at HPA, said resistance to one of the major groups of antibiotics, the carbapenems, is found throughout India.

‘This is important because carbapenems were often the last ‘good’ antibiotics active against bacteria that already were more resistant to more standard drugs.’

The first two patients confirmed to have been infected had traveled abroad shortly before they were admitted to hospital in the UK. One patient carrying the tainted bacteria was transferred to a Nottingham hospital at the end of last year after suffering a trauma injury in Pakistan. More:

We’ve only got ourselves to blame for the indestructible Indian superbug

From Daily Mail: Knowing what we know now, if we could go back in time we would have prescribed antibiotics sparingly and only when they were really needed.

If we had done that, we may not have been facing the prospect of superbugs for the next 100 years.

Instead, antibiotics have been massively overprescribed, thrown willy-nilly at patients by harassed and time-pressed doctors for a host of minor ailments – often coughs and colds that aren’t even caused by bacteria in the first place.

As Professor Enright says: ‘Every time you throw enough antibiotics at enough people, you encourage the evolution of drug-resistant mutants.’

This happens everywhere, from GP surgeries in Britain and the U.S. – where antibiotics are the medicine of choice for just about every minor childhood snuffle – to India, where antibiotics are available cheaply over the counter without a prescription. More:

Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?

In The Guardian: The era of antibiotics is coming to a close. In just a couple of generations, what once appeared to be miracle medicines have been beaten into ineffectiveness by the bacteria they were designed to knock out. Once, scientists hailed the end of infectious diseases. Now, the post-antibiotic apocalypse is within sight.

Hyperbole? Unfortunately not. The highly serious journal Lancet Infectious Diseases yesterday posed the question itself over a paper revealing the rapid spread of multi-drug-resistant bacteria. “Is this the end of antibiotics?” it asked.

Doctors and scientists have not been complacent, but the paper by Professor Tim Walsh and colleagues takes the anxiety to a new level.More:

Indian men seek whiter shade of pale

Saritha Rai at GlobalPost:

Skin-whitening products aren’t just for the ladies anymore.

In new India, where the market for skin-lightening creams is more than $500 million a year, men are being spoon-fed the message that having fairer skin is the fastest way to fame and fortune.

And they are eating it up.

Venkatesh Vadde, 25, has been using lightening cream for the last couple years. He says it helps him look more professional at his job as a quality analyst in Bangalore.

“My girlfriend makes fun of me,” he said during a recent interview. “But I don’t mind because lots of men I know use fairness creams.” More:

The cheapest womb: India’s surrogate mothers

Rafia Zakaria at Ms. magazine:

Drawing by Leonard DaVinci. Public domain.

The Akanksha Infertility Clinic is a small pastel building inside a walled compound. Located in Anand, India, the clinic is one of hundreds in the country offering the local women as commercial surrogates. For a fraction of what it can cost in the United States, infertile couples or single parents can hire a woman to stay in the hostel for nine months and bear their child.

Potential surrogates recruited by the Akanksha Clinic are healthy married Indian women who have children of their own. Once a party to the agreement, they can no longer live at home, have sexual contact with their husband and must leave older children behind to live at the hostel. They sleep nine to a room, are administered daily iron shots and follow a closely monitored diet. More:

A cure for cancer – or just a very political animal?

The Go-vigyan Kendra institute in India claims to harness the medicinal powers of cows for human benefit. But, asks Andrew Buncombe in The Independent, what are its real motives?

In a stinking, smoking room in which large metal cauldrons spat and sizzled atop wood-fuelled fires, Dr Nandini Bhojraj pointed with pride to four plastic buckets placed on the floor. One, she declared, contained cow’s milk, another cow’s urine, a third “dung juice” created by soaking cow excrement in water, while into the last had been poured clarified butter, or ghee.

The purpose of the witches’ kitchen-like set-up was to heat and combine all four to create a wonder drug for humans. “It will cure 99 per cent of all diseases,” Dr Bhojraj declared. For more than a decade, she and a team of fellow enthusiasts and activists at the Go-vigyan Kendra institute and farm in central India have been quietly researching the medicinal and health-boosting qualities of the Indian cow.

Using principles they say come from both ancient medicine or ayurveda and Hindu texts, they have created a range of items based on cowpathy, or the five traditional cow products – milk, urine, dung, butter and ghee.

There is shampoo to prevent dandruff, mosquito repellent, incense, tooth-whitening powder manufactured from dung charcoal as well as the more obvious fertiliser and insecticide. At one point, a sister farm in the north of India even had plans to produce a soft drink from cow’s urine. But earlier this summer, the establishment of 280 cows and 50 staff set amid the thick jungle that is home to groups of langur monkeys, captured the headlines when it announced it had obtained patents in the US and China for another distilled urine product, marketed as Gomutra Ark, that it claimed could help cure cancer and several other serious conditions. More:

No place to die

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Dante Alligheri's death mask [Flickr: digitalmama's photostream

So we know that quality of life in India is abysmal. Now, a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit on the quality of death, ranking end-of-life care across 40 countries places India at the very bottom, at #40. Sponsored by the Singapore-based charity, Lien Foundation, the survey looked at end-of-life palliative care where patient recovery is unlikely and it is, therefore, up to the physician to make death easier.

The survey took into account such parameters as public awareness, training availability and access to pain killers. At the top of the list? The UK in terms of its hospice care network and statutory invovlement in end-of-life care, followed by Australia and New Zealand.

To read the report click here

Students donate sperm to earn a quick buck

Diya Bannerjee in The Times of India:

He is a major in sociology, swears by his Barthes and Durkheim, and likes to ride his dad’s old 350cc bike. Away from the cafeteria of his Delhi University campus and in a quiet corner of an infertility clinic in south Delhi, he is also ‘donor number 456′. So when he freezes his sperm in a vial that’s kept at minus 1960 degrees C and gets paid for it, he doesn’t think he’s doing it for extra pocket money. An increasing number of students are donating sperm for cash. It takes care of their coffee-date, cigarettes and that pair of jeans they have been eyeing for long.

“We prefer students coming in for (sperm) donations,” says Dilip Patil, managing director of Mumbai-based sperm bank Cryos International India. “In return, we pay them adequately for their generosity.” Patil adds that while many may want to sign up for the job because it pays well — one sample fetches almost Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 — the donor should ideally also express a desire to help childless couples. “It should be an altruistic effort and not a money-making gimmick.”

In India, where sperm banks are mushrooming at a frenetic pace, the donor community is hardly growing. Morals and ethics are the two stumbling blocks that doctors have to contend with. Senior IVF consultant and fertility specialist Sushma Sinha of Apollo hospital, New Delhi, says, “The student community is young and able, so naturally they are the best donors.” More:

The master card

A guitar-playing bureaucrat’s vision has delivered cashless, paperless healthcare to 60 million poor Indians for Rs 30. Samar Halarnkar in The Hindustan Times:

Her face gaunt and her voice a whisper, 24-year-old Rekha is exhausted after a month of living with an unrelenting fever, diagnosed two weeks ago as typhoid.

Today, there’s a new diagnosis: Tuberculosis.

Her husband, Rajkumar (both use one name), sits on her bed. Clean-shaven and whippet thin, he looks tired, lost and closer to teenage than 25. An odd-jobs man from a village 16 km south, Rajkumar is unemployed.

In normal Indian circumstances, Rajkumar and Rekha would be prime candidates to expend their savings, perhaps borrow money and become part of this probability: About 250 million who live just above the poverty line slip back into poverty if they face just one health crisis, says a report released in February by the Independent Commission on Development and Health in India. India’s hospitalisation costs have soared in urban areas by 126 per cent and in rural areas by 78 per cent between 1995 and 2004, according to the National Sample Survey Organsation.

But finding money for his wife’s treatment isn’t one of Rajkumar’s worries.

Earlier this year, Rajkumar showed his ration card; paid Rs 30; had his and Rekha’s thumbprints scanned; their photos taken and is now covered up to Rs 30,000 under the unsexy sounding Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (National Health Insurance Scheme), known by its acronymn, RSBY.

In 26 months, RSBY has enrolled more than 60 million people in 22 states; by next year that should double to 100 million. This is the first use, on this scale, of India’s technology prowess to run a national socal-security programme. If RSBY succeeds, it could be the precursor for reforms in other schemes.

Rajkumar and Rekha — the scheme accepts five people per family — can walk into 5,000 public and private hospitals across India, produce the RSBY card and get healthcare. No paperwork. No cash. No questions asked. More:

‘You have to work out your own salvation’

SN Goenka is the leading teacher of vipassana, a popular Buddhist meditation technique. He spoke to Shekhar Gupta on how Buddhism changed him and how he brought vipassana back to the country of its origin. From The Indian Express:

Do you respect Buddha as a god or a teacher?

He isn’t god. He was an enlightened person. He was a scientist of the spiritual world. Without scientific apparatus, 2,600 years ago, he had said the entire world or the universe has no solidity. Your body too has no solidity, (it is) mere vibration. Scientists now have started saying this too.

So, you don’t worship Buddha?

No. Even in his lifetime, when people came and paid him respects, he told them that the only way they could pay him respect was to practice meditation the way he taught. He said: I can’t help you. Nobody can help you. Koi Buddh ho jayega, he will show you the path. You have to step on the path. That will give you the result, not the teacher. That is the tradition maintained by a few people in Burma. And that is vipassana.

What does vipassana mean literally?

To observe reality as it is. No imagination, speculation, belief or disbelief is allowed. When people start realising the truth of their body and minds, how they work, they come out of misery. Vinobaji (Vinoba Bhave) had once challenged me. He said he couldn’t believe vipassana could help people be freed of their impurities. Only god can help, he said.

I said, sir, it has helped me. He said he would accept vipassana if it can reform schoolchildren with no discipline and hardened criminals. I said, sir, I am new in this country. You arrange courses, I will teach and let’s see the result. So he arranged a course in his own school. In every sentence, the students there had some abuse or filthy language. They had no discipline. After vipassana, they did not use bad language anymore.

Three years later, the home secretary of Rajasthan also did a course and was impressed. I said you are the home secretary, let me hold one or two courses in a jail. He talked to the chief minister and got permission. Then, Kiran Bedi said you must be come to Tihar (jail). A thousand inmates took part in our sessions. The government even established a centre there. More:

India: Morning after pill brings sexual freedom

Saritha Rai at GlobalPost:

Bangalore: At Sundeep Medicals, a busy drugstore at one end of Bangalore’s prominent Brigade Road, two teenage girls breeze in and ask for the iPill, and then argue over whether they should buy one or two.

“Buying emergency contraceptives has become like buying candy bars,” said Shreyansh Sankhla, who owns the store. They sell so fast, said Sankhla, that he ran out of stock last month and could not replenish as the distributor had sold out too.

Fifty years after the pill heralded women’s sexual emancipation in the West, emergency contraceptive is becoming a new phenomenon in India. Despite fierce opposition from conservative quarters, morning-after pills are available without a prescription and presage a different kind of sexual empowerment in this fast-changing country.

Aditi, a 21 year-old call center executive who did not want to give her last name, said the use of iPill and Unwanted-72, both one-pill emergency contraceptive brands, is rampant among her colleagues and friends. They no longer have to depend on their partners using condoms. More:

A cellphone device to test your eyes

In The Indian Express:

A new, low-cost device developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab can diagnose refractive defects of the eye in under two minutes.

The Near-Eye Tool for Refractive Assessment, or NETRA, Sanskrit for ‘eye’, is a little device that can be clipped on to a phone with the requisite software installed on it. With an array of lenslets made of plastic, the device uses the phone display to run tests and generate a prescription in less than two minutes.

Associate Professor at the Camera Culture Lab, Ramesh Raskar, who led the project, said the device can be mass-produced for less than $2 a piece and used to diagnose myopia, hypermetropia and astigmatism.

Read more at MIT Media Lab here and here

To see how it works, watch the YouTube video below.

‘Sholay’s’ whip-wielding Gabbar now a masseur

Arlene Chang in the Wall Street Journal:

Ramgarh village, approximately 50 kilometers southwest of Bangalore, is set to undergo an image makeover and become a swanky lifestyle resort. That will be a far cry from its previous incarnation as the rustic rocky refuge of feared dacoit, Gabbar Singh, in “Sholay.”

Ramnagaram, which was renamed Ramgarh in the 1975 Bollywood classic, was immortalized in cinema by the scene where Gabbar (Amjad Khan), whip in hand, paces around watching Basanti (Hema Malini) dance on shards of glass to save her lover’s life.

Visitors to the under-construction resort can be sure they will not see Gabbar wielding his whip or bellowing against the rocky backdrop: “Tera kya hoga Kalia?” (What will happen to you, Kalia?)

Instead, Gabbar – or a staff member dressed as him – will provide you with a relaxing massage and serve you beverages from “Gabbar ka Adda” (Gabbar’s den).

In this clip from the movie though, the dreaded bandit enjoys some evening entertainment by his campfire. More:

India to patent yoga poses

From Hindustan Times:

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has prepared patent formats of nearly 900 yoga asanas (postures), to prevent European and American companies involved in fitness-related activities from claiming them as their own.

These asanas will all be included in the digitalised Traditional Knowledge Library (TKDL), set up by the council to collect and record traditional treatment therapy knowledge. Medicines and yoga asanas registered with it enjoy the status of being patented.

“Video recordings of the asanas are also being made and recorded to prevent them from being stolen,” said TKDL director Dr VK Gupta.

The CSIR began the project in 2006. These 900 asanas have been collected from Patanjali’s classic work on yoga, as well as other ancient classics like the Bhagwat Gita. More:

Yoga expert: ‘It seems idiotic they can patent it’

Swami Pragyamurti Saraswati argues that Indian government’s attempt to create a rigid system of yoga misses the point. In The Guardian:

The 64,000 postures form only a tiny part of yoga. Poses are not an end in themselves, but a preparation for deeper, more meaningful practices. The word yoga means oneness and unity – unity with the self. Discover who you are, and then that can give you a sense of oneness with others and ultimately the whole of creation, and the divine.

Poses are not the definition of yoga, which consists of breathing practices, deep relaxation, and meditative practices – not just postures. There’s a whole yoga to do with mantras, another to do with music.

I would definitely give anyone trying to patent any postures a very wide berth. They haven’t invented anything. The practices and traditions of yoga go back thousands of years. At best, we are interpreters of ancient wisdom. More:

India’s tampon king

Jason Overdorf at GlobalPost:

Not long ago, women in the small south Indian town of Coimbatore were convinced that 47-year-old A. Muruganantham was some kind of pervert.

After a failed attempt with his wife and sisters and a cockeyed do-it-yourself effort with a football bladder full of goat’s blood, he’d finally hit upon a surefire way to test the low-cost sanitary napkin he was developing for India’s poor. He was passing out free pads to college girls and collecting their used napkins for study. And he had a storeroom full of them. When his mother saw it, she burst into tears and packed her things to move in with his sister.

“Everybody claimed I am a psycho, [that] I am using this as a trump card to get close to girls,” said Murugantham, who taught himself English in the course of his research — partly to get past the telephone answering systems he encountered when he called U.S. suppliers. “Before going across that automatic, it will cost 300 and 400 rupees. The moment the operator starts speaking, it will cost 300 and 400 rupees. Then the person will speak in slang English, ‘OK,’ because this is a material that is only used by big companies.”

Nobody thinks he’s a psycho anymore.

In 2006, Muruganantham, a high school dropout, perfected a machine for making low-cost sanitary napkins against all odds. More:

The kung-fu nun of Kathmandu

From Kuensel, Bhutan:

Jigme from Nganglam Dechenling in Pemagatshel is the most energetic and enthusiastic of the group.

She enrolled in the nunnery last year, after completing class five from Lungtenphu primary school in Thimphu.

Although she was among the top ten position holders in her class at Thimphu, Jigme said her faith in dharma and interest to become a nun caused her to discontinue studies.

“It’s my sixth month running here at the nunnery,” she said. Within that short span of time, Jigme can fluently speak Nepali, Hindi, Tibetan and Ladhaki languages, which are widely spoken at the nunnery.

Her Vietnamese master said that, although kung-fu was new to her, Jigme was able to attained the sixth of the 16 basic levels of the art.

“When I practise, I visualise I’m in a real combat,” Jigme said.

Besides learning to defend themselves from a handful of troublemakers in the vicinity of the monastery, kung-fu, Jigme said, made one capable of sitting straight-backed for many hours during meditations, ceremonies and teachings. More:

Homeopathy is witchcraft, say doctors

From The Telegraph, London:

Hundreds of members of the BMA have passed a motion denouncing the use of the alternative medicine, saying taxpayers should not foot the bill for remedies with no scientific basis to support them.

The BMA has previously expressed scepticism about homoeopathy, arguing that the rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence should examine the evidence base and make a definitive ruling about the use of the remedies in the NHS.

Now, the annual conference of junior doctors has gone further, with a vote overwhelmingly supporting a blanket ban, and an end to all placements for trainee doctors which teach them homeopathic principles.

Dr Tom Dolphin, deputy chairman of the BMA’s junior doctors committee in England told the conference: “Homeopathy is witchcraft. It is a disgrace that nestling between the National Hospital for Neurology and Great Ormond Street [in London] there is a National Hospital for Homeopathy which is paid for by the NHS”. More:

A yoga manifesto

From The New York Times:

Propped on the ledge on a round pillow, his wavy, shoulder-length hair framed by the urban jungle backdrop of tar-covered roofs, Mr. Gumucio recounted his biography, and how it was linked with that of Bikram Choudhury, perhaps the most famous name in yoga today.

“The idea for Yoga for the People came to me because of Bikram,” Mr. Gumucio said, explaining that he worked for Mr. Choudhury for six years, from 1996 to 2002, sometimes running teacher training for Bikram Yoga in Los Angeles, commuting from Seattle, where he was living. He channels Mr. Choudhury, one suspects not for the first time, talking with a raspy, slightly accented voice: “Boss, do me a favor, take everybody’s class and tell me what you think.” Mr. Gumucio obliged, and when reporting back, mentioned one teacher whom he didn’t like. Mr. Choudhury was not sympathetic. Just the opposite, telling Mr. Gumucio to, in essence, suck it up and go back to the class — that the problem wasn’t with the instructor, but with Mr. Gumucio himself. “You are your own teacher,” Mr. Gumucio said he was told. “You are responsible for your own experience.”

It was a revelatory moment for Mr. Gumucio. If the student was more important than the teacher, why was there such an emphasis placed on the individual instructors? Too often, Mr. Gumucio saw students stop doing yoga because they couldn’t practice with a favorite teacher. Why not jettison that system? Why not just assign students to the next available teacher?

A second revelation occurred in class when he was struggling to keep his body in a difficult position. “I was sweating, my muscles shaking, in triangle pose, and Bikram was talking about how fast he was as a boy in Calcutta. How he could catch this dog.” The situation was almost more than Mr. Gumucio could bear. “In my mind,” he recalled, “I was thinking ‘What is wrong with you. Stop this stupid story!’ ”

Later, Mr. Choudhury again dismissed his complaints, telling Mr. Gumucio that distractions were everywhere: “Candle, incense, music, easy to meditate!” Mr. Gumucio recalls being told. “Try being calm and peaceful in your car when someone cuts you off.” More:

A tribal belief that maims — and kills — hungry children

A section of the front page of The Hindustan Times: Children show their scars in the photo by Arvind Kumar Sharma.

B Vijay Murty in The Hindustan Times:

A barbaric method of maiming and inadvertently killing hungry children in tribal India shows how the nation is failing its poorest and furthering the Maoist rebellion.

Children with distended bellies, characteristic of malnutrition and disease, routinely have red-hot iron rods plunged into their sides by superstitious, poverty-stricken tribal parents in the belief it will cure all stomach ailments.

Fatally injured or infected during this primitive procedure, several children die — there are no official figures — in a state where 17 of 24 districts are simultaneously classified by its own government as “food insecure” and “highly affected” by Maoists, who bank on the collapse of governance to aid their growing influence.

This is the belief: A child with a protruding belly has worms, which can be killed by plunging a red-hot iron through the sides of the stomach. More:

Yoga guru to launch political party in India

Yoga guru Baba Ramdev has announced his entry into politics. He said candidates from his party, named as Bharat Swabhiman, would contest elections for all 543 seats in the next Parliamentary elections.

From The Indian Express: “While vowing to stay away from elections himself, the guru said he would make sure that his proposed political party would have at least seven lakh members in each constituency.

“I have been working for this for the past 20 years. Over the past two years, I have met nearly three crore people in Hardwar, trained and mobilised thousands of people in 60 districts. I want to use black money for the good of the country, ensure that offences like corruption and terrorism get the capital punishment, and turn the political system towards the policy of Swadeshi. This is not a knee-jerk decision,” he said.

Previously in AW:

The strange case of the twins of Kodinji

In a village in Kerala, something extraordinary is happening. The phenomenally high rate of twins born there far exceeds the national average, presenting medical researchers with a mystery that is as yet unsolved. Vinita Bharadwaj in The National:

The latest survey, from December 2009, counted 265 pairs of twins in the village, which is home to about 3,000 families and 13,000 inhabitants. This equates to a twinning rate of about 30 to 35 per 1,000 live births within a radius of about 500 metres. The average in the rest of the country is 8.1 per 1,000 live births.

The anomaly has caused a sensation in research circles and generated enormous national and international media interest in Kodinji in the past two years.

The number of reporters and researchers arriving unannounced is growing, not always to the delight of the villagers. Tucked away in the lush green northern parts of Kerala, Kodinji is a small village in the Malappuram district. It is a quiet, unassuming village with the noticeable signs of Gulf money pouring in to sustain its people. Small billboards advertising abaya fashion dot the road leading to the village and large multi-storeyed houses with wild gardens of banana and coconut trees function as symbols of prosperity.

At the day-long camp, 175 pairs of twins from the village, dressed in their Sunday best, are examined by a team of doctors led by Dr Sribiju, a dermatologist and geriatrician, who goes by one name. The doctors measure the twins’ height and weight and note down the vitals of each participant. A dietician then interviews the twins and their parents for a nutritional assessment. One of the examiners, who prefers not to give their name, later says the preliminary observations did not indicate any outward abnormalities in the twins’ health and well-being.  More:

Get a womb: Gay couples outsource Indian mothers

Saritha Rai from Bangalore at GlobalPost:

In a building smack in the middle of chaotic Hyderabad, an hour’s flight from Bangalore, 29-year-old American Brad Fister recently got acquainted with the delirious joy of first-time parenthood.

Fister and his partner Michael Griebe, who own a computer business in Kentucky, contracted a womb from an Indian surrogate mother thousands of miles away in Hyderabad. Their daughter Ashton, conceived in a laboratory out of Fister’s sperm and an anonymous donor’s egg, was born in mid-February.

India has long been the go-to destination for a diversity of outsourced tasks such as answering customer service calls, online tech support and high-end technology services.

Now Americans — and increasingly gay American couples — are follwing American corporations into the world of oursourcing. More:

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

From TED:

At Pawan Sinha’s MIT lab, he and his team spend their days trying to understand how the brain learns to recognize and use the patterns and scenes we see around us. To do this, they often use computers to model the processes of the human brain, but they also study human subjects, some of whom are seeing the world for the very first time and can tell them about the experience as it happens. They find these unusual subjects through the humanitarian branch of their research, Project Prakash.

In this talk, Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

Pre-marital sex: Rural youth more active

From The Indian Express:

New Delhi: Rural youth have more pre-marital sex than their urban counterparts. The less educated are more likely to cast their vote and India’s youth is ill-prepared for employment in a globalised economy. It is information like this that the government hopes will help it understand the ‘vulnerability’ facing the nation’s youth.

In a first of its kind study, researchers and policy makers have tracked key phases in a person’s life, especially concerning health, marriage, civic participation, pre-marital sexual activity and work force participation. The consolidated data of the study — conducted in six states — will be launched by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad on Saturday.

Youth in India: Situation and Needs is the first ‘sub-nationally representative’ study undertaken by the government to track key transitions experienced by young people in six states in India. More:

The end of the squashy tomato?

Researchers at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research in New Delhi have developed tomatoes genetically modified to stay fresh for 30 days longer. From The Telegraph, Calcutta:

Plant biologists in India have discovered two previously unknown genes that are involved in fruit ripening and shut them down to create what might be the world’s longest-lasting tomatoes.

The tomatoes developed at the National Institute of Plant Genome Research (NIPGR), New Delhi, can retain their firmness and texture for up to 45 days without refrigeration, compared with ordinary tomatoes that shrink and lose texture in about 15 days.

The researchers at the NIPGR have applied their gene-silencing technology on tomatoes, but they say it may also, in theory, be used to increase the shelf life of mangoes, papayas and bananas.

“We’re not adding new genes into tomatoes — the shelf life is increased by shutting down two genes that make the fruits go soft,” said Asis Datta, the senior scientist at the NIPGR who led this research. More:

[Graphic: The Telegraph]

Yoga for foodies

From The New York Times:

The past decade has produced thousands of new foodies and new yogis, all interested in healthier bodies, clearer consciences and a greener planet. Inevitably, the overlap between the people who love to eat and the people who love to do eagle pose has grown. In 2007, a combination yoga studio and fine dining restaurant, Ubuntu, opened in Napa, Calif.

Yoga retreat centers now offer gourmet cooking classes and wine tastings; New York yogis trade tips about which nearby ashrams (Anand) and studios (Jivamukti) serve the best muffins.

But not everyone agrees that the lusty enjoyment of food and wine is compatible with yogic enlightenment. Yoga purists say that many foods — like wine and meat — are still off limits. Others, like Mr. Romanelli, say that anything goes, as long as it tastes good. The debate is exposing rich ores of resentment in the yoga world.

“The culture of judgment in the yoga community — I call it “yogier than thou” — is rampant, and nowhere more than around food,” said Sadie Nardini, a yoga teacher in New York. (“Yogis” are those who do yoga, teachers and students alike.) More:

Taliban — a risky ally in the war on polio

From the Wall Street Journal:

Mehtar Lam, Afghanistan — Knocking on door after door, thousands of volunteers fan out every month across southern and eastern Afghanistan, vaccinating children against polio, a disease eradicated almost everywhere else in the world.

Usually, the volunteers — sent by the government and sponsored by United Nations agencies — bring a single-page letter requesting people to cooperate, “for the benefit of our next generations.” The letter’s signatory: Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed supreme leader of the Taliban.

“We always carry a copy,” says Dr. Attar Wafa, the chief of polio vaccinations in the insurgent-infested province of Laghman, much of which is a no-go area for government workers and foreigners.

The antipolio campaign brings together the Taliban, President Hamid Karzai’s central government, Unicef and the World Health Organization in an uneasy but functioning partnership — one that recognizes the reality of the insurgents’ stranglehold over large chunks of the country. More:

Baba Ramdev: guru, TV star and source of controversy

Rama Lakshmi in The Washington Post:

Haridwar, India: At the crack of dawn, 4,000 people sitting on yoga mats silently watched the renowned guru Baba Ramdev on stage. After his introduction as the one who will dispel the darkness of ignorance, the orange-robed Ramdev chanted “Om” into a microphone. The audience followed with a reverential hum.

“Eat this every morning to prevent cancer,” he said, holding up four holy basil leaves.

“No blood pressure and asthma problem if you do this daily. Be free from medicines!” he exclaimed after performing a few yoga postures and demonstrating six breathing techniques. The crowd cheered. More:

Vodka-based hangover cure

From The Times, London:

A nutritionist claims to have invented an alcoholic cocktail that could prevent festive hangovers by “cleaning” the bloodstream. The vodka-based tipple contains a string of “superfoods” that cleanse the system and ward off the effects of heavy drinking.

It is the brainchild of the British nutritional therapist and Indian “superfood” guru Gurpareet Bains, 32. He said: “This cocktail is about helping people have a good time without having to pay for it the following morning.”

The “Christmas spice-infused acai and pomegranate cocktail”, which has an alcohol by volume rate of 40 per cent, will still cause drunkenness, but its ingredients fight the symptoms of a hangover — commonly a splitting headache, parched mouth and the overwhelming desire to vomit. More:

The story of a womb

In the Sunday Express a report from Anand in Gujarat, India’s surrogacy hub and the story of a woman who rented her womb:

Ramilaben Solanki: "This time I am asking for Rs 5 lakh ($10,000) because I am too weak to keep doing it many more times."

Ramilaben Solanki: "This time I am asking for Rs 5 lakh ($10,000) because I am too weak to keep doing it many more times."

Before she pressed her inked thumb on the contract agreement, they had made Ramilaben Solanki understand that she is a womb. No more, no less. They had told her that the baby would be no part of her flesh and blood. That she was its shell, only a shell.

But sitting in the dark of her single-room, tin-roofed hovel—home to nine more people in her extended family—this 27-year-old domestic help in Gujarat’s Anand is still fighting to come to terms with herself. She thinks that the “pink infant with the golden hair and light brown eyes” of his American father, the one she bore and delivered, had come of her. Not through her.

For seven days and nights after, until the American couple from Wisconsin, US—whose sperm, ovum and money helped make her baby—flew in, Ramila had fed him her milk, sung him to sleep. She had also whispered in his ears that he is Deep, younger brother to her own five-year-old daughter, Deepali. More:

[Photo: The Indian Express]