Pakistan's anti-polio drive suffers a blow after a northern enclave reports first case in 7 years
PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Pakistan efforts to eliminate polio suffered another blow on Monday after a northern enclave reported its first case in seven years. Overall, it was the country's 11th case since January, despite the launch of several immunization drives.
The virus was detected in a child from the district of Diamer in the Gilgit-Baltistan region, according to the country's polio eradication program.
Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan remain the only two countries where the spread of the wild polio virus has not been stopped, according to the World Health Organization. There are ongoing outbreaks of polio linked to the oral vaccine in 10 other countries, mostly in Africa.
The new case was reported after Pakistan on Sunday wrapped up its third nationwide polio vaccination drive of the year, aiming to immunize 45 million children.
Mohammad Iqbal, a director at the polio program in the northwest, said local health officials were still trying to determine how the poliovirus that was found in the southern port city of Karachi had infected the child in Diamer.
During the summer season, thousands of tourists from Karachi and elsewhere visit tourist resorts in Gilgit-Baltistan.
Pakistan's polio eradication program has been running anti-polio campaigns for years, though health workers and the police assigned to protect them are often targeted by militants who falsely claim the vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children.
Since the 1990s, attacks on polio vaccination teams have killed more than 200 workers and security personnel.
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Business Standard
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- Business Standard
From compliance to confidence: Toward transparent and trusted food systems
Every year on June 7, World Food Safety Day reminds us of a simple but critical truth: access to safe food is a shared responsibility and a public good. The theme for World Food Safety Day 2025 is "Food safety: science in action". This theme highlights the crucial role of scientific knowledge in ensuring food safety, from developing safe practices to addressing foodborne illnesses, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). With consumers growing more vocal about what goes into their food and increasing scrutiny of terms like 'flavour enhancers' and 'chemical preservatives', conversations around food safety have moved from niche policy circles to public discourse. Against this backdrop, a recent Stakeholder Engagement Workshop on Food Additive Safety and Toxicity(SEW FAST), hosted by CSIR-IITR and the Food Future Foundation, took place in Lucknow. It brought together scientists, industry experts, and regulators to examine the persistent gulf between public perception and scientific evidence around food additives. Food additives play a crucial role in preservation, taste enhancement, stability, and nutritional fortification of food. They are especially important in ensuring food safety and security in a country as vast and diverse as India. From ensuring shelf-life in variable hot and humid climates to supporting sodium-reduction strategies through flavour modulators, additives serve both technological and public health purposes. Still, public wariness around food additives remains. A clear example is monosodium glutamate (MSG), which has faced more scrutiny than most. Recent scientific and regulatory evaluations conducted by authoritative bodies across the world, including Food Standards Australia New Zealand, European Commission, WHO, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and even Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) have consistently affirmed its safety. Yet, legacy perceptions persist which feed certain warning labels. The time has now come to bring regulatory clarity to food additives such as MSG and re-establish public trust through evidence-based policymaking. MSG is a naturally derived sodium salt of glutamic acid, an amino acid abundantly found in foods like tomatoes, mushrooms, cheese, and even human breast milk. It enhances flavor through the umami taste, helping make food more palatable, especially for vulnerable populations like the elderly. It has been misrepresented as harmful for far too long, and it is essential to address this gap between perception and scientific reality. In India, food products containing MSG are still required to carry a warning label: 'Not Recommended for Infants and Pregnant Women.' While this requirement reflected the precautionary approach of its time, today's scientific landscape has evolved significantly. Comprehensive global reviews have reaffirmed the safety of MSG, including for sensitive populations, which is less than 1 per cent. As science progresses, policy must have the flexibility to evolve with it ,creating a balance between local relevance and global alignment, ensuring that regulations protect public health, support trade, and respect India's unique characteristics. Updating labelling practices in line with current evidence offers an opportunity not only to align with international standards, but also to strengthen consumer confidence and encourage innovation. This matters for public health. For example, MSG has the potential to support sodium reduction strategies. MSG contains only about 12 per cent sodium, compared to 39 per cent in table salt. Replacing salt partially with MSG in recipes can reduce overall sodium content by up to 30 per cent without sacrificing taste, which is a benefit recognised by the US Institute of Medicine and numerous public health experts. So, what can we do with this knowledge? As consumer awareness grows and food systems become more complex, our regulatory frameworks must evolve. A few principles can guide this shift: Existing models often assume worst-case scenarios of daily maximum consumption. Instead, the country needs an India--specific Food Additive Intake Model (FAIM), based on real dietary data, population groups (infants, elderly, pregnant women), and seasonal consumption. This would enable more realistic estimation of scenario on daily exposure as well as also less than life time, apart from chronic exposure, and may reduce excessive conservatism in identifying safety margin. Regulatory decisions must be communicated to the consumer with clarity, especially the difference between hazard (potential harm) and risk (likelihood of harm) in simple terms. Establishing interdisciplinary advisory councils and platforms for consumer-scientist dialogue can help demystify policies and enhance public trust. India's precautionary labeling laws, such as those on MSG, have not kept pace with recent development of science. As seen in the iron-fortified rice precedent, labels can be updated when evidence evolves. Doing so signals regulatory maturity and consumer respect. It's a collaborative and dynamic process, far from a mere legacy. The theme of World Food Safety Day 2025 reminds us, in the subject of MSG, the crucial role of scientific knowledge in ensuring food safety, from developing safe practices. Regulations must be proactive and forward-looking, not merely reactive. By embedding science into the policymaking process, and not just at the end, we can anticipate risks better and foster innovation responsibly. The goal is not to silence scrutiny, but to enable informed scrutiny. As India prepares to take greater leadership in global food policy, let us ensure our food additive regulations are not just robust, but also scientifically rational. In the case of food additives, that means recognizing the overwhelming scientific consensus, removing unnecessary warnings, and allowing science, not stigma to guide the way.
The Hindu
3 hours ago
- The Hindu
Exposomics for better environmental health
The focus for World Environment Day in 2025 (June 5) is on ending plastic pollution. Micro-plastics represent one of the many thousands of chemical, physical and biological hazards that lurk in the air, water and living spaces for which we have neither the sensory capabilities nor sensing technologies to measure exposure and assess health risks. Thus, reducing the environmental disease burden continues to be a daunting challenge for public health. In India, rapid economic growth is increasing the scale and the complexity of environmental exposures and the interdependencies between the living environment and lifestyles. With India already accounting for nearly 25% of the global environmental disease burden, there is a need to develop newer paradigms for environmental management that rest on integrated health risk assessments. These must include all environmental factors into the study of disease development. The piece-meal approaches that define our current framing on environment or health indicators are likely to exaggerate environmental health inequities and result in spiralling health costs. We must embrace new and cutting-edge scientific developments in the field of 'exposomics' to gain a more complete picture of disease etiologies over the life course and develop holistic prevention strategies. Strategic investments in long-term environmental health surveillance that integrate novel environmental and biomonitoring efforts with digital health and data science platforms are critical. Environmental disease burden The World Health Organization (WHO) began estimating the environmental disease burden in 2000, which is the basis for the modern estimation approach being adopted in the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries, and Risk Factor (GBD) study. Each cycle of the GBD identifies risk factors with the greatest attributable health burden. In the latest cycle (2021) that included 88 risk factors, environmental and occupational (OEH) risk factors in the GBD were responsible for 18.9% (12.8 million) of global deaths and 14.4% of all disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), led by ambient PM 2.5 air pollution (4.2% DALYs, 4.7 million deaths) and household air pollution from the use of solid fuels for cooking (3.9% DALYs, 3.1 million deaths). In India, nearly three million deaths and 100 million deaths are attributable to occupational and environmental health (OEH) risks. OEH risk factors in India are also estimated to account for more than 50% of the attributable burden for non-communicable diseases including ischemic heart disease, stroke, chronic obstructive lung disease, lung cancer, asthma and, more recently, diabetes and chronic kidney disease. Risk factors such as lead exposures can have grave developmental health impacts for children under five, with India accounting for up to 154 million or 20% of the total estimated IQ points lost globally in children under five. What are we missing? The GBD results provide a strong and robust body of evidence to initiate actions for cleaner air, safer water and better sanitation. However, the current environmental burden of disease addresses only a limited number (around 11) of categories of environmental risk factors as there is a paucity of human exposure data. Several environmental risk factors that can contribute to significant health burdens are currently not included in the GBD. These include various chemical exposures, risks from complex mixtures such as micro-plastics and solid waste and physical hazards such as environmental noise. More importantly, environmental risk factors interact in complex ways with metabolic (high blood pressure or high fasting plasma glucose) and behavioural risk factors (smoking and unhealthy diets) as well as underlying genetic susceptibility and upstream health determinants (such as socio-economic status) to produce a health impact within populations. Risk estimates are often derived for single risk factors; while confounding is often well adjusted in long-term cohort studies, complex mixtures and interactions over a life course have not been adequately explored. Finally, climate change can magnify hazards posed by multiple environmental risk factors, such as heat, air pollution, vector-borne diseases, storms and flooding, and wildfires. Climate change may reduce crop yields, reduce agricultural worker productivity, disrupt food security and affect food supply chains. Depression, anxiety and other mental health outcomes, driven by both ecological concerns and direct health impacts of climate-sensitive environmental risk factors such as fine particulate matter, are also important to consider. Several of these risk factors can occur together, resulting in compound events and synergistic effects. These hazards can further amplify health impacts among populations with inadequate access to health systems or healthy food systems. Methods and data are not yet available to support inclusion of these important risk factors in the global burden of disease assessments. Thus, the current environmental burden of disease estimates are not only a conservative underestimates but also do not provide an adequate means of prioritising against competing risk factors to develop holistic, scalable preventive health strategies. The human exposome The global human genome project (1990-2003) revolutionised our ability to explore the genetic origins of disease. 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Exposomics aims to bridge this gap by understanding how external exposures from physical, chemical, biological and psycho-social environments interact with diet and lifestyle and internal individual characteristics such as genetics, physiology, and epigenetics to create health or disease. This would allow the generation of an atlas of exposure wide associations (EWAS) to complement genome-wide associations (GWAS) and enable discovery-based analysis of environmental influences on health. The exposome requires synchronisation of several inter-disciplinary technologies which include real time sensor based personal exposure monitoring with wearables; untargeted chemical analyses on human biomonitoring samples; testing on human-relevant micro-physiological systems (also known as organs-on-a-chip) wherein in vitro models replicate the structure and function of human organs or tissues to understand the mechanistic basis of biological response; and big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) to mine data and generate integrated pieces of evidence. Given that capacities and resources to generate exposomics data are not widely available, an immediate need for the exposomic framework to become a reality is also the creation of a data ecosystem in which harmonised data can be found, accessed, and shared through sustained and interoperable data repositories. Mainstream environment within health Exposome frameworks may seem implausible or irrelevant in India where the implementation of environmental health management programmes faces numerous hurdles. But, leapfrogging to technology and data-driven approaches is not new to the health sector. Exposomics offers unprecedented potential to mainstream environmental risks within public health programmes by generating more accurate predictive models for many chronic diseases while also enabling precision medicine. Unbridled investments in capacity building and synchronising available analytical, environmental and public health infrastructure offer the promise of addressing the concerns of our populations with unprecedented cost-effectiveness. The time is ripe for the Indian environmental health community to engage and contribute to the global momentum on the science of exposomics. Future celebrations of World Environment Day may soon focus on why the human exposome project can be the best prescription for holistic prevention efforts that preserve and promote health equity. Dr. Kalpana Balakrishnan is Dean (Research), Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research (SRIHER), Chennai
Time of India
4 hours ago
- Time of India
Paris seeks personhood status for River Seine
Paris seeks personhood status for River Seine (AP) PARIS: French authorities want to give legal rights to the River Seine to better defend the world-famous waterway in court and protect its fragile ecosystem, part of a global movement to grant legal personhood to nature. In a resolution adopted on Wednesday, the Paris City Council called on parliament to pass a law granting the Seine legal personhood to enable "an independent guardian authority to defend its rights in court". "The Seine must be able to defend itself, as a subject of law and not as an object, because it will always be under attack," said Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo. Conservationists have backed granting fragile ecosystems such as rivers and mountains basic legal rights to better protect them. In a world first, New Zealand in 2017 recognised the Whanganui River revered by Indigenous people as a living entity, with legislation combining Western legal precedent and Maori beliefs. In 2022, Spain granted personhood status to the Mar Menor, one of Europe's largest saltwater lagoons, to give its threatened ecosystem better protection. The Paris Council based its decision on the conclusions of a citizens' convention on the future of the Seine held between March and May. Fifty citizens chosen at random proposed granting the Seine fundamental rights such as "the right to exist, to flow and to regenerate". The Seine must be considered an ecosystem that "no one can claim ownership of", where the preservation of life must "take precedence over everything", the convention concluded. It also noted "positive" change, with the Seine now home to around 40 species of fish, compared to only four in 1970. French authorities spent $1.5 billion ahead of the 2024 Olympics to clean up the Seine, the 777-kilometre (482-mile) river that flows through Paris past the Louvre, Notre Dame cathedral and other iconic landmarks. However, it is threatened by pollution, rising water temperatures and the use of pesticides in agriculture. The opening of the river to the public for swimming this summer could present "additional risks", warned the convention. Fulfilling a key legacy promise from the Paris Games, authorities are to allow the public to swim from July 5 at three points in the Seine, which is now deemed safe for a dip.
