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It’s Olympic season, and India already has cause to rejoice, with Manu Bhaker’s bronze in the 10-metre air pistol event. Globally meanwhile, all eyes are on renowned United States gymnast Simone Biles. Ms. Biles, who is one of the most decorated gymnasts in the world, had made headlines during the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, after she had difficulties during a vault, and ultimately withdrew from the team finals – she later said that she was not physically injured, but was prioritising her mental health.
“I have to focus on my mental health…We have to protect our minds and our bodies and not just go out and do what the world wants us to do,” Ms. Biles reportedly said at the time, helping throw the spotlight on, and igniting a public conversation around mental health.
Even in the health sector, experts have for long said, mental illness remains one of the most neglected of problems. In India, the National Mental Health Survey 2015-16, found that 10.6% of adults suffered from mental disorders, but the treatment gap ranged between a staggering 70% and 92% for different disorders. This year’s Economic Survey 2023-24, released ahead of the Union Budget, highlights this issue for the first time, writes Bindu Shajan Perappadan: the survey says that at an aggregate economic level, mental health disorders are associated with significant productivity losses. There is also evidence of poverty exacerbating the risk of mental health due to stressful living conditions, among other factors.
On poverty, homelessness and mental illness, Vandana Gopikumar and Supriya Sahu write that social protection and support measures for homeless people with mental illness require a radical shift and a reframing from paternalistic interventions to liberatory-focused strategies. In parallel, structural issues such as discrimination and violence, segregation and deprivation, need to be emphatically addressed.
Mental health also came up in the Parliament, where the Budget session is ongoing: asked about student deaths by suicide in coaching centre hub Kota, the Union Minister of State for Education, Sukanta Majumdar said several steps were being taken both by the Central and Rajasthan governments: he pointed to the ‘Manodarpan’ initiative under which a national toll-free helpline and a website help provide psychological support to students. He also said only 1.2 per cent of total suicide cases are related to failure in examinations as per the National Crime Records Bureau – however, these numbers are believed to be an undercount of the real crisis. What strategies are needed to tackle mental health among students? In this piece by R. Sujatha, experts say multiple departments including health, education, information and broadcasting and others need to come together to develop strategies for suicide prevention, while also teaching students about the importance of mental well-being.
Students apart, India’s rapidly-growing ageing population, is also vulnerable to mental illnesses: here, Sunil K. Khokhar, writes that up to 40% of dementia cases may be preventable by addressing modifiable risk factors, and as always, early detection and timely intervention are key.
An interesting research finding this week on mental health is that a new tablet that slowly releases the drug ketamine can ease treatment-resistant depression, offering an alternative to cumbersome clinic-based treatments for people with the condition, researchers have found in a clinical trial, writes Sneha Khedkar, here.
And if you’re interested in the history of mental healthcare and how looking after the mentally ill evolved, Preeti Zachariah’s article on a lecture given by psychiatry professor Sanjeev Jain, will give you a glimpse.
Moving on to other current news, the World Health Organisation has said it sees a ‘high risk’ of polio virus spreading across war-ravaged Gaza, after circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2, was isolated from environmental samples from sewage. The WHO said it was sending more than one million polio vaccine doses to be administered to children. Notably, it said that before the war, Gazan youngsters had access to “robust” routine vaccination services.
Children in conflict zones are vulnerable to a number of disease outbreaks: an mpox outbreak in Congo displacement camps has already seen around 27,000 cases, and claimed more than 1,100 lives, most of them children, since the beginning of 2023.
The good news this week? Researchers in South Africa have made a significant breakthrough in vaccine development by gene-editing BCG, the only vaccine available for tuberculosis, to make it more effective. TB is more than 9,000 years old, but the BCG vaccine, which itself is over 100 years old, is primarily effective only in infants and young children. From India too, there’s news about TB: the Indian Council of Medical Research has begun work on bringing in affordable, faster and easy-to-use testing technology for detection. Remember, TB kills an estimated 4,80,000 Indians every year.
On the subject of gene editing, do read this piece that details how scientists from the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi, have developed an enhanced genome-editing system that can modify DNA more precisely and more efficiently than existing CRISPR-based technologies. The other piece of good news is on the HIV/AIDS front: from New York Times headlines in 1981 that spoke of a mysterious fever to understanding HIV, scientific understanding about AIDS has grown exponentially since the first cases were detected, writes Sruthi Darbhamulla, examining progress in light of the 25th International AIDS Conference, held earlier this month in Munich. This is critical in light of the fact that the UN reports that nearly 40 million people had HIV in 2023, but lack of treatment meant someone died every minute of AIDS-related causes. Speaking of infections and vaccines, R. Prasad writes that three years after interim data was posted as a preprint, Bharat Biotech and ICMR are yet to publish any long-term safety data of the Covaxin (the Covid-19 vaccine) phase-3 trial. The deafening silence around these results, he says, must end. Meanwhile, the WHO has launched a new project to accelerate the development in poorer countries of vaccines for human bird flu infections, using cutting-edge messenger RNA technology. Our tailpiece for the week is C. Aravinda’s story of a tragedy that transformed drug safety: thanks to the vigilance one woman officer in the FDA, Frances Kelsey, thalidomide, hailed as a wonder drug in multiple countries in the 1950s, was not allowed in the United States – and rightly so, as it was later found that the drug caused serious birth defects.
Rounding off the week, here are these explainers:
A look at what’s in store for the health sector under the Union Budget 2024 On the Nipah virus in Kerala, this piece explains how the State broke free of centralised testing and sequencing, with samples now also being tested at the Institute of Advanced Virology in Thiruvananthapuram, making for faster diagnosis
If you have time, do dive into these stories:
Siddharth Kumar Singh interviews public health expert K. Srinath Reddy on the state of healthcare in India; I write on the Economic Survey’s push for better diets for young Indians, even as the Women and Child Development Ministry said about 17% of children in the age group of 0-5 years are underweight, while 36% are stunted and 6% are wasted.
Continuing the alarm bells over heat after three of Earth’s hottest days ever measured, the United Nations called for a flurry of efforts to try to reduce the human toll from soaring and searing temperatures. Do also read this related explainer: How does extreme heat affect medicines and those taking them?For many more health stories, head to our health page and subscribe to the health newsletter here
Published - July 30, 2024 04:26 pm IST
