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Health
Why Kerala's Dengue Patients Are Twelve Times More Likely to Die Than Tamil Nadu's
Tamil Nadu carries India's biggest dengue caseload and one of its lowest death tolls; Kerala runs the opposite trade, with far fewer cases but far more deaths. The gap is Kerala's population, not its outbreak.
August 1, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
India Meets Just 0.2 Percent of Its Own Heart Transplant Need
A new Lancet analysis finds India covers just 0.2 percent of its own heart transplant need and 7.2 percent of kidney need. The shortfall traces to where transplant capacity sits, not to how many people need one.
July 30, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
India's Dementia Risk Is Led by a Lack of Schooling, Not Diabetes
A Bengaluru cohort study points to diabetes and hearing loss as India's dementia risk profile. The country's own nationally representative study names a different leading factor by a wide margin, and diabetes does not even reach significance.
July 30, 2026 · 8 min read
Health
India's Smaller Districts Are Out-Vaccinating Its Big Cities on HPV Shots
Karnal, a mid-sized Haryana district, has vaccinated five times the share of its HPV target that Faridabad and Ludhiana have managed. The pattern holds across two states, and it complicates the story India tells about the rollout.
July 28, 2026 · 6 min read
Health
Why China Fined a Hospital So Little for a Child's Gene-Editing Death
A Chinese hospital paid a fine of about $3,500 after a 6-year-old patient died in an experimental $860,000 gene-editing trial. India's own stem-cell clinics operate under the same kind of unenforceable guidelines.
July 27, 2026 · 6 min read
Health
India Is Gaining Years of Life, Not Years of Health
India's life expectancy keeps climbing. Its healthy life expectancy has not kept pace, and the gap between the two, already wider than the world average, is about to meet a population of the old that will more than double by 2050.
July 27, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
How Fixing Child Malnutrition Is Fueling India's Diabetes Epidemic
The Indian states that cut child stunting fastest over the last five years are now posting the steepest rises in adult obesity and diabetes. A well-documented biological mechanism explains why the two trends are connected, not coincidental.
July 24, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
India Approved a Dengue Vaccine Without the Safety Screen the Last One Needed
India's drug regulator cleared Takeda's Qdenga for anyone aged 4 to 60, with no test for whether they had dengue before. Qdenga's own trial data show that history is exactly what its protection depends on.
July 21, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
Only 12 Percent of India's Brain Clot Patients Carry a Genetic Cause
A new ICMR hospital registry finds anaemia and alcohol use, not inherited clotting disorders, are the leading risk factors behind India's brain clots. Genetic causes showed up in only one in eight patients tested.
July 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
More Than a Quarter of Adults May Have a Newly Named Pancreas Disease
A February 2026 consensus of 15 medical societies gave fatty pancreas its first formal definition, tying it to diabetes and pancreatic cancer risk. India carries one of the world's largest diabetic populations and almost no routine imaging built to find it.
July 20, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
India Tightened Its Cholesterol Targets Instead of Its Test
A diagnostic cutoff drawn from a 2001 American guideline still decides who counts as abnormal in India. Rather than rebuild the test, Indian cardiology quietly rebuilt the treatment target.
July 19, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
The Trial Behind Serum Institute's New TB Vaccine Never Enrolled an Indian Patient
India carries a quarter of the world's tuberculosis cases and Serum Institute is the planet's largest vaccine maker. Neither drove the science behind the vaccine Serum Institute just agreed to manufacture; a Gates Foundation nonprofit did.
July 18, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
Farmers in Andhra Pradesh Are Dying From a Disease a Cheap Test Could Catch
A Lancet series warns the world about undiagnosed kidney disease. Andhra Pradesh's Uddanam farm belt already lived through it, and India built a system that treats kidney failure, not the disease that causes it.
July 16, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
Serum Institute Stockpiled 620,000 Doses for a Disease India Has Never Had
The Serum Institute of India built an Ebola vaccine stockpile in two weeks flat. India has never recorded a single case of the disease it protects against.
July 16, 2026 · 8 min read
Health
Chandipura Virus Kills Children Faster Than India Can Test For It
Gujarat has confirmed just 7 of 27 tested Chandipura cases, with 8 results still pending days later. The same lab bottleneck undercounted the 2024 outbreak, and there is still no vaccine to fall back on.
July 15, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
Bangladesh's Measles Outbreak Is the Live Test Assam Hasn't Passed
Assam's measles vaccination rate has climbed to 83 percent, but the coverage a virus this contagious needs to stop spreading sits close to 94 percent. Bangladesh's 2026 outbreak, which has killed more than 500 people, shows what that gap can cost.
July 14, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
A Single Day of Extreme Heat Nearly Equals Five Years of India's Official Heat Deaths
Europe's 2026 heatwave produced a precise, fast death toll in France, Belgium and the UK. India's own scientists estimate a single extreme day kills nearly as many people as five years of the government's official count.
July 13, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
Late Diagnosis, Not Rising Risk, Explains India's Cancer Survival Gap
India's cancer burden is not spiraling out of proportion to the world's. Its survival odds are, and the gap traces to when patients are found and how much treatment reaches them.
July 11, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
India's C-Section Rate Is Rising Fastest Where Hospitals Get Paid Per Procedure
India's caesarean rate has nearly doubled the WHO's ceiling. The sharpest divide isn't between sick and healthy mothers, it's between hospitals paid per procedure and hospitals that aren't.
July 3, 2026 · 8 min read
Health
Government Schemes Cover 42 Percent of India's Insured, Pay 8 Percent of the Premium
For the first time on record, more of rural India carries health insurance than urban India. Almost all of that growth is riding in on government schemes that pay insurers a fraction of what commercial cover does.
July 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
The Extra Years Indian Women Live Are Almost All Spent Disabled
Indian women outlive men by 2.8 years, but almost all of that extra time is spent living with a disability, not extra healthy life. The household spends less treating their illnesses and asks more of them in return.
July 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
This Cancer Blood Test Flags 2,362 False Alarms For Every Real Case
Zydus and Apollo are bringing a blood test for colorectal cancer to India. Run its own published accuracy against how rare the disease actually is, and most of its positive results will not be cancer.
July 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
Rural Telangana Men Now Drink and Smoke More Than the Cities
Rural Telangana's men now drink and smoke more than the men in its own cities. The disease hasn't caught up yet on paper, but the state already ties for India's worst kidney damage from it.
July 3, 2026 · 7 min read
Health
A 40-50 Billion Rupee Industry Warning Kept Thiram Legal in India
India drafted a 2020 order restricting the fungicide Thiram. An industry warning about a market worth 40-50 billion rupees made sure the draft never became a rule.
July 3, 2026 · 7 min read