During a night in November 2025, a 30-year-old woman in Gujarat sat in silence in a dimly-lit house, with the room’s darkness disrupted by the soft glow of her smartphone. Her three cats were dying of the contagious Canine Parvovirus. Faced with a veterinarian she did not trust as they didn’t give a proper diagnosis […]

It was Benjamin Disraeli, a two-time Prime Minister of the UK and a notable writer, who famously said: “The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their happiness and all their powers as a State depend.” This thought process and its finer distillation—that public health is not charity or benevolence but […]

Today, the Indian healthcare sector presents a picture of major technical advances. Metro cities boast “5G-enabled” hospitals that rival the technological sophistication of the best hospitals in the world. We are told about AI reading scans, robotic arms assisting surgeons, doctors consulting patients over video, and wearable devices tracking heart rates and sleep patterns. This […]

“My son wanted to become a wrestler. How does a liver collapse in a healthy child like him?” Sharik Khan’s mother whimpers, tears streaming down her face. Sharik was only 13 years old when he succumbed to acute liver failure. From January 27 to February 20 this year, nearly 22 others of Chhainsa village in […]

More than half the world’s population eats rice every day. For many communities across South and South-East Asia, it supplies nearly half their daily calories. But in a broad swathe of the Gangetic plains—from eastern Uttar Pradesh to West Bengal—this staple is carrying something it should not: arsenic. Arsenic is a naturally occurring element found […]

The sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik’s sculpture for World Malaria Day, at Puri beach in Puri, Odisha, on April 24, 2026. | Photo Credit: PTI The first-ever malaria treatment for newborns and infants pre-qualified April 25 was World Malaria Day, and just ahead of that, the WHO announced the pre-qualification of the first treatment developed specifically […]

In June 2018, Rashida Ali was travelling with her nephew from Jammu to a wedding when their car crashed. Her nephew walked away with minor injuries. Rashida’s arm was badly damaged; she would spend the next seven months in recovery and still cannot move her hand fully. Her husband, Ishfaq, told Frontline that her survival […]

For decades, Kerala’s public healthcare system has stood as a source of collective pride for the State. It was woven into the Malayali imagination as proof that a small State, with limited wealth and resources, could build an unparalleled humane public system and ensure healthcare delivery. The proof is in the pudding. During the Nipah […]

There are no pure vegetarians. That’s just advertising, and it is time we called its bluff. A grammatical error cannot be a shortcut to salvation. One can, of course, be purely vegetarian or onlyvegetarian, but purity doesn’t enter into it. Yes, all cultures and religions have “purity laws” when it comes to food, but the […]

The COVID-19 pandemic transformed biological research from a specialised scientific pursuit into a subject of global political debate. High-containment laboratories, pathogen surveillance, biosafety and gain-of-function (GoF) research, once discussed largely within scientific journals, have become matters of public policy and national security. The recent disclosures by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence […]