NEW DELHI : The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) on Tuesday released details of 2017 Global Burden of Disease (GBD) report which says that India has the second highest number of early deaths due to PM2.5 in the world — nearly equals China’s.

According to a statement issued by the CSE the new estimates of the global burden of disease (GBD) released today by the US-based Health Effect Institute (HEI) paint a grim picture for India. Globally, air pollution is estimated to cause more than 4.2 million early deaths — of these, 1.1 million deaths occur in India alone.

This is more than a quarter of the global deaths. India now nearly equals China which scores the highest number of early deaths due to PM2.5. Worse, India now tops the dubious list of highest number of early deaths due to ozone pollution.
The rate of increase in early deaths in India is quite scary. While early deaths related to PM2.5 in China have increased by 17.22 per cent since 1990, in India these have increased by 48 per cent. Similarly, while early deaths due to ozone in China have stabilised since 1990, in India these have jumped by 148 per cent. This demands urgent intervention.
Air pollution is the leading environmental cause of death worldwide; as many as 92 per cent of the world’s population lives in areas with unhealthy air. The 2017 report presents a deeper analysis than the earlier GBD report (2015) and examines the long term trends from 1990 through 2015.
The HEI has built on the GBD project of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), involving more than 2,000 researchers. These researchers enumerate and track death and disability and the influence of behavioral, dietary, and environmental risk factors for more than 300 diseases and injuries, by age and sex, from 1990 to the present, in 195 different countries and territories.

“India cannot afford to remain complacent or on denial any more. With so many people dying early and falling ill and losing productive years due to particulate and ozone pollution, it is a state of health emergency. This demands nation-wide intervention to ensure stringent mitigation and a roadmap to meet clean air standards,” says Anumita Roychowdhury, executive director-research and advocacy, CSE.
The number of premature deaths due to PM2.5 in India is the second highest in the world — it has nearly equaled China’s dubious record. While China has recorded 1,108,100 premature deaths, India records 1,090,400 deaths. Even though India had started off with a much lower number of people dying early deaths in 1990, it has quickly caught up with China.
Not only the absolute numbers of early deaths are high in India, the rate of increase is higher than China’s. While early deaths related to PM2.5 in China has increased by 17.22 per cent since 1990, in India it has increased by 48 per cent.
Early deaths in India are also the highest among the South Asian countries – it is 9 times higher than neighbouring Bangladesh and 8 times higher than Pakistan. This is an extremely serious issue – in the past, the GBD estimates had indicated that air pollution was the fifth largest killer in India.
Without anyone noticing it ozone, a very reactive gas, has become a serious health problem in India. Even though the absolute number of early deaths due to ozone is far less than those caused by PM2.5 – 107,800 compared to 1,090,400 due to PM2.5 — India records the highest number of ozone-related deaths in the world. Ozone aggravates respiratory problems, especially chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). It may be noted that India has now included COPD in its non-communicable disease programme.

Deaths due to ozone are showing a much higher rate of increase than deaths related to particulate matter. It is this rate of increase in India that is scary: ozone-related early deaths in India have recorded an increase by as much as 148 per cent since 1990. During the same period, health risk from particulate pollution has increased by 48 per cent.

Ozone-related early deaths in India are 33 per cent higher than those recorded for China. India has also recorded a much faster increase in ozone-related deaths since 1990 than China – on an average, the increase ranges at 20 per cent in India as opposed to 0.50 per cent in China. In 1990, ozone deaths in India were far less than in China. But now India has surpassed China, where ozone-related deaths have remained more or less stable.

In South Asia, ozone deaths in India are 13 times higher than in Bangladesh and 21 higher than in Pakistan.
CSE has followed up to understand the reason for the high number of ozone-related deaths. The HEI scientists explain that ozone in GBD estimates is from the chemical transport model, but the evidence of increasing ozone levels in India, especially in north India, is seen from the available measurements.

For ozone, the increase in exposure is so large that it overwhelms the improvements in underlying chronic obstructive pulmonary disease mortality – in other words, exposure matters and combines with aging and population growth to lead to increasing deaths. For particulate matter, there is an increase in exposure but the overall improvement in mortality rates is large enough to lead to a decrease in the death rates.
Ozone is not directly emitted but is formed by reaction of a variety of gases like nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds under the influence of sunlight and temperature. According to scientists, formation of ozone is expected to be higher in countries in tropics and sub-tropics and near the equator.

To some extent, rising temperature is also aggravating this trend. India will be well advised to take early and stringent steps to control ozone precursors which are very difficult to control. This means stringent control of gaseous emissions from combustion sources including vehicles. The air pollution problem cannot be dismissed as dust. Ozone precursors like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxides and volatile organic compounds also have serious local public health impacts.
This new analysis shows that long-term exposure to fine particulate matter has contributed to 4.2 million premature deaths and to a loss of 103 million healthy years of life globally in 2015.  This is the fifth highest risk factor for deaths from heart disease and stroke, lung cancer, chronic lung disease, and respiratory infections. This report has looked at 79 health risk factors.

An additional 254,000 deaths occur due to exposure to ozone and its impact on chronic lung disease. PM2.5 was responsible for a substantially larger number of deaths than other well-known risk factors.
The European Union is the third highest in terms of health risks from particulate and ozone. The US stands sixth in health risk from particulate pollution and fourth in ozone pollution.

It is important to note that the developed world that has witnessed early action on air pollution, has seen some improvement but the risk remains. In the US, there has been about 27 per cent reduction in average annual population exposures to fine particulate matter. The reduction in Europe is comparatively smaller. Yet some 88,000 Americans and 258,000 Europeans still face increased risks of dying early due to particulate levels today.
It maintained that the new scary results leave no room for diffidence and denial of the problem anymore. As the GBD analysis now becomes an annual tracker of change, it is possible for the world and India to know the trend in emerging health risk from air pollution.  This has to inform policies and action to protect public health.

The Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change needs to implement nation-wide strategy to control both particulate and gaseous pollutants to meet clean air standards, it quoted Roychowdhury as saying.

MUMBAI:  Eman Ahmed, termed the heaviest women in the world, today landed in Mumbai for weight reduction treatment at a local facility. Ms Ahmed, 36, landed at Mumbai international airport around 4 am.
Ms Ahmed, who has not moved out of her house for 25 years, would be under observation for about a month before she undergoes surgery, doctors said.She is currently under the care of a city-based bariatric surgeon Muffazal Lakdawala, and his team of doctors.

The doctors have been treating Eman for almost three months and took all the necessary precautions needed for the transportation of bed-bound Eman from Egypt’s Alexandria city.

“Even though transporting Eman to Mumbai was a challenging task keeping in mind the complexities of her case as she is a high risk patient who has not been able to move or leave the house for the past 25 years,” doctors said.eman ahmed worlds heaviest woman mumbai

Eman Ahmed, 36, landed at Mumbai international airport around 4 am.Eman was accompanied by Aparna Govil Bhasker, an Advanced Laparoscopic and Bariatric Surgeon at Centre of Obesity and Digestive Surgery and Head of Department of Bariatric surgery at Saifee hospital, and Kamlesh Bohra, Senior Intensivist, Department of Critical and Intensive Care at Saifee Hospital in Mumbai.

“She, along with her sister Shaimaa Ahmed, arrived here early today. To prepare her for the flight, the team of doctors have been in Egypt for the last 10 days to optimise the conditions for her travel; given the fact that she is so heavy and not moved for the last 25 years she is at a high risk for a pulmonary embolism and hence has been put on blood thinners to try and minimise the chances of such an eventuality during her transfer,” doctors said.

According to News Agency a special bed was created to transport Ms Ahmed. As a precautionary measure, the flight was furnished with all the equipment required in case of an emergency such as portable ventilator, portable defibrillator, oxygen cylinders, intubating laryngoscopes and other safety drugs.
Ms Ahmed is being transported by a fully equipped truck, which will be followed by an ambulance and a police escort to Saifee Hospital where a special room has been created for her.
(with inputs from PTI)

NEW DELHI : The Delhi High Court today set aside the Centre’s decision to ban 344 fixed dose combination (FDC) medicines. The court, while allowing 454 pleas of pharma majors, said, the Centre went about in haphazard manner while banning 344 FDCs.

It said, the government took the decision without following procedure prescribed under the statute.The government had, in March, banned 344 FDC drugs, which extended to about 6,000 brands.
The petitions had questioned the validity of the ban. During the hearings, the Centre had said the ban was in public interest as the combination drugs were not safe and have been banned in several countries.
The court had reserved its verdict in the case on the 2nd of June.

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NEW DELHI: Centre has reduced the prices of 500 drugs, surgical supplies and other medical consumables in the last two years.
This was informed by Minister of Chemicals and Fertilisers Ananth Kumar while sharing the achievements of his Ministry during the period in New Delhi yesterday.
He said that Jan Aushadhi stores are being increased to around 3,000 in the current year from just around 100 in 2014.
Mr Kumar said that country has an unhealthy dependence on China for 80 bulk drugs or APIs, which are active raw materials used to make drugs. He said, therefore to boost domestic
production, bulk drugs parks are also being established.The Minister said the country has witnessed a record production of 245 lakh tonnes of urea in the 2015-16 fiscal on back of the policy initiatives taken by the government.

Washington: A new study has reveals that a higher resting heart rate is linked to increased risk of death from all causes, even for those people who are not suffering from heart diseases.
Dongfeng Zhang of the Medical College of Qingdao University said that the association of resting heart rate with risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality was independent of traditional risk factors of cardiovascular disease and suggested that resting heart rate was a predictor of mortality in the general population. In the study, researchers assessed 46 studies involving 1, 246, 203 patients and 78, 349 deaths from all causes, and 848, 320 patients and 25, 800 deaths from heart disease.
The authors said that results from this meta-analysis suggested the risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality increased by 9% and 8% for every 10 beats/min increment of resting heart rate. They found that people with a resting heart rate of more than 80 beats/min had a 45% higher risk of death from any cause than those with a resting heart rate of 60-80 beats/min, who had a 21% increased risk.
However, the absolute risk is still small. Findings were similar for people with cardiovascular risk factors. Zhang said that their results highlighted that people should pay more attention to their resting heart rate for their health, and also indicate the potential importance of physical activity to lower resting heart rate.

The authors concluded that the magnitude of association between resting heart rate and all-cause mortality was stronger than that with cardiovascular mortality, and this discrepancy could be expected because resting heart rate had been also found to be associated with non cardiovascular mortality.

GURGAON: Megastar Amitabh Bachchan on Friday said that though India is a country with various beliefs, religion should not be a hurdle in health and medication.
The 73-year-old actor, who is the brand ambassador of India in the fight against tuberculosis (TB), said during the polio eradication campaign he found that there were few communities who stayed from the medication in name of their belief.
“The huge problem which we face during health campaigns is, how one should reach out to the people? India is a diverse country with various beliefs which keep people away from taking a specific kind of medication. We had problems with polio.
There were several communities, who thought taking polio drops was something against their caste or religion. Health and medication should not be linked to religion,” said Bachchan while launching the campaign ‘Call to Action: A TB Free Haryana.’

The Piku star also opened up about why eradicating TB was close to his heart.”… I was diagnosed with TB in 2000 and I felt that I need to talk about it because I have a personal interest in the cause. It makes a point to share the issue with others and encourage them to perhaps fight with the problem face to face,” he said.

The actor along with Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar was present at the launch of two mobile vans to support in the campaign and he took the occasion as a platform to break myths attached with the disease.
“Normally TB is associated with people, who live in poor conditions, … but what I want to convey is that irrespective of the environment you live in there is a possibility that you can attach TB to your body,” he said.
“I also want to say, even though I got infected by tuberculosis I was able to cure it by medication. If I am standing in front of you today I can say confidently I am absolutely free of TB,” he added.
Bachchan, who has been appointed as the ambassador for girl child by UN, also expressed his desire to work for Haryana’s “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” campaign.
“There are many things that all of us do with a heart. Most of us are involved in several campaigns and activities which are done voluntarily, but have a far reaching effort.
United Nations and UNICEF have appointed me as the ambassador for girl child and if Chief Minister of Haryana Mr Khattar wants any support from me in ‘Beti Bachao Beti Padhao’ campaign I will willingly do it,” he said.
Bachchan said the success of the polio campaign inspired him to take up the cause of TB eradication.”The inspiration behind getting attached to this cause was the polio eradication campaign which I was a part of. And almost eight years later, I am proud to say today we are free of polio. One day I wish to see our country free from TB as well.”
The initiative, undertaken by Medanta – The Medicity hospital, has been launched in collaboration with the government of Haryana, the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease (The Union) and the Central TB Division of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare.