Word: healthful
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...Japan, kodokushi, a phenomenon first described in the 1980s, has become hauntingly common. In 2008 in Tokyo, more than 2,200 people over 65 died lonely deaths, according to statistics from the city's Bureau of Social Welfare and Public Health. The deaths most often involve men in their 50s and the nation's rapidly increasingly elderly population. Today, 1 in 5 Japanese is over 65; by 2030 it will be 1 in 3. With senior citizens increasingly living away from family and a nationwide shortage of nursing homes, many are now living alone. "There is a kind of myth...
...UNICEF India's Chief of Health, Henri van den Hombergh, points out that local women's groups should not be taken as a substitute for institutions where professional care is available to sick newborns. But, he says, "peer influencing" of the type that goes on at these meetings - relating to commonsensical practices, like hand washing and good hygiene - certainly helps. "The neonate is too cold because the baby isn't wrapped well; the baby isn't getting enough breast milk; the baby is showing signs of infection. These three simple things are the underlying causes of the majority...
Researchers say they've found a way to keep more newborns alive in the poorest corners of eastern India: Get their mothers talking. A report published in The Lancet medical journal last month suggests that gathering women together for monthly chats on sound pregnancy practices and reproductive health may drastically cut neonatal mortality rates in rural communities. "Too many people in the health community think that health is about delivering little magic bullets to passive poor people," says Anthony Costello of University College London's Institute of Child Health, which spearheaded the project. "What that doesn...
...these don't survive their first day. In Jharkhand and Orissa, two of east India's most impoverished and underserved states, the numbers are worse still - 49 and 45 deaths per 1,000 live births, respectively. The neonatal mortality rate in China, by comparison, lingers under 15. "Just improving health services will not do," says Dr. Prasanta Tripathy, who founded the Indian social welfare NGO Ekjut with his wife Dr. Nirmala Nair. "Communities need to be made aware of what it is in their own power to accomplish." (Read 'India's Medical Emergency...
...Ekjut and the Institute of Child Health teamed up to stage a regional intervention that would show moms how they could themselves reduce this risk. Their plan was to mobilize a few thousand women from a clutch of villages in one Orissa and two Jharkhand districts as part of a three-year trial (2005 to 2008). A similar project in the mountainous Makwanpur region of Nepal, where health facilities can easily be a six-hour walk away, required the Institute to organize local women into groups. In east India, it rallied an existing structure of "self-help groups," a national...