A New Cure For Diabetes?

A New Cure for Diabetes? Reuters reports that, "Indian scientists say cow urine can reduce blood sugar levels. Scientists at Bangalore Veterinary college say a new study shows that cow's urine may lower blood sugar levels."

Swallowing Live Fish For Health

In Hyderabad where I grew up, every June after the first rain there would be a flood of people coming to the city for this treatment.

Reuters reports that, "Thousands throng to swallow a live fish "wonder cure" in southern India. In India's southern Hyderabad city, people gather to receive a traditional treatment believed to cure asthma and other respiratory ailments. Patients buy a two-inch-long Murrel fish, and swallow it live after it has been stuffed with a herbal mixture. And for people finding the remedy a little hard to swallow, there are doctors on hand to help the fish on its way."

Where Wealth is Health!

While India's economic growth is on the media radar, and articles
about how Americans and other westerners are going to India for it's
high quality, yet relatively cheap healthcare get written, the truth
is that there are many millions of Indians who are getting poorer and
are unable to receive proper healthcare. Capitalism is on the rise.

From a New York Times article, titled, "Royal Care for Some of India's
Patients, Neglect for Others" -- "Mr. Steeles, 60, a car dealer from
Daphne, Ala., had flown halfway around the world last month to save
his heart, at a price he could pay. He had a mitral valve repaired at
a state-of-the-art private hospital here, called Wockhardt, and for 10
days, he was recuperating in a carpeted, wood-paneled room, with a
view of a leafy green courtyard.

A dietician helped select his meals. A dermatologist came as soon as
he complained of an itch. His Royal Suite had cable TV, a computer, a
minirefrigerator, where an attendant that afternoon stashed some ice
cream, for when he felt hungry later. Three days after surgery, he was
sitting in a chair, smiling, chattering, thrilled to be alive.

On his bed lay the morning's paper. Dominating its front page was the
story of other men, many of them day laborers who laid bricks and
mixed cement for Bangalore's construction boom, who had fallen gravely
ill after drinking illegally brewed liquor. All told, more than 150
died that week, here and in neighboring Tamil Nadu State.

Not for them the care of India's best private hospitals. They had been
wheeled in by wives and brothers to the overstretched government-run
Bowring Hospital, on the other side of town. Bowring had no intensive
care unit, no ventilators, no dialysis machine. Dinner was a stack of
white bread, on which a healthy cockroach crawled while a patient,
named Yelappa, slept.

Wockhardt has 30 ventilators, including some that are noninvasive, so
the patient does not have to have a tube rammed down his throat. At
any one time, a half-dozen are in use. An elderly woman had been in
its intensive care unit for a week, on dialysis; her family wanted to
do whatever possible to keep her alive, no matter the cost.

At Bowring, one of the young doctors, named Harish, said a ventilator
and a dialysis machine would have allowed him to keep half of his
patients alive. The most severe case, Mohammed Amin, was breathing
with the aid of a hand pump that his wife squeezed silently. Dr.
Harish sent the relative of one man to get blood tests done at the
nearest private hospital; there was no equipment to do the test here.
Then the doctor rushed to the triage section in Bowring's lobby, where
the newest patient, writhing, resisting, disoriented from the poison
in his gut, had to be tied down with bedsheets."

Universal healthcare is not just needed for the US, it is required for
other capitalistic societies like India as well.

Read the full NYT article at--
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/01/weekinreview/01sengupta.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

A new kind of balloon!

A new kind of balloon in India, thanks to health workers who are shy
to talk about the benefits and use of condoms.

ANI reports that, "Many claims are being made by the Governments, both
at the Centre and the States about distribution of condoms in their
campaign against the spread of HIV/AIDS and for population control.
But the fact is that villagers are unaware how to use them. The health
workers are shy to discuss how and why the condoms are used because of
social taboo."

Watch this video at--
http://www.mediascrape.com/News/ViewNewsItem.aspx?newsItemId=30053&rootVideoPanelType=1

A Diabetes Education Campaign in Queens, NY

South Asians are at high risk for heart disease and diabetes, though
culturally, it is preferred not to make a big deal of this. It is
certainly good to see someone doing something about this and bringing
the issues out into the open...

An excerpt from the New York Times --

"But Type 2 diabetes strikes a sixth of the more than 200,000 New
Yorkers whose families are from the Indian subcontinent. That gives
them the highest rate of the disease among the city's major ethnic
groups.

In this population, "people expect that everybody has it," said Dr.
Jyotsna Changrani, the director of the South Asian Health Initiative
at New York University. "All of your friends have it, all of your
family has it," she said.

Researchers have concluded that less body fat is needed to trigger the
disease for South Asians. "The people of South Asian descent that we
see are often not obese," said Dr. Daniel Lorber, chief of
endocrinology at the New York Hospital Center of Queens. "You'll
frequently see men with just a little bit of a potbelly, right at
ideal weight based on Caucasian standards."

Mindful of this vulnerability, the New York State Health Foundation, a
private group, has donated $255,000 to Beth Israel Medical Center to
help bring to the South Asian communities of Queens a diabetes
education campaign like those found in Harlem and the Bronx.

The campaign will not lack an audience in Jackson Heights, where it is
rare to enter a store without meeting someone who suffers from the
ailment generally referred to, even in Hindi or Urdu conversations, as
"sugar" or "sugar-hogi."

Read the full article at --
http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2008/03/02/nyregion/thecity/02diab.html&tntemail0=y