Introduced by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the health insurance scheme with a grand vision, named as Ayushman Bharat providing the subscribers a medical expenses cover of up to Rs 5 lakh. Here is what you must know about the scheme and the eligibility criteria that will help you benefit from the scheme. Called by other names such…
Health insurance remains one of the under-penetrated segments in India with only 25-30% of Indians having health insurance. However, like in every other field, technology is likely to play an integral part even in the insurance sector. Even the insurance regulator is batting for the use of wearable devices for life and health insurance policies; which…
The allocation for the ministry of health and family welfare (MoHFW) in Budget 2019 is likely to increase from Rs 52,800 crore (budget estimates) in the current financial year 2018-19 to Rs 59,039 crore in the next financial year (2019-20); an increase of 11%, according to the medium term expenditure projection statement presented to the Parliament in…
Influenza is highly contagious and easily spreads as people move about and travel, making tracking and forecasting flu activity a challenge. While the CDC continuously monitors patient visits for flu-like illness in the U.S., this information can lag up to two weeks behind real time.
A new study, led by the Computational Health Informatics Program (CHIP) at Boston Children's Hospital, combines two forecasting methods with machine learning (artificial intelligence) to estimate local flu activity. Results are published today in Nature Communications.
Immune cells called CD4+ T cells could be important mediators of protection against the Zika virus, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens by Sujan Shresta of the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology, and colleagues. The findings support vaccine strategies that induce a protective CD4+ T cell response to the Zika virus.
Vaccine hesitancy is among the top 10 health threats facing the world in 2019, the World Health Organization says. The movement against vaccinations has taken hold in a number of countries, including the United States. The percentage of American children ages 19 to 35 months who have not been vaccinated has quadrupled since 2001, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, Newsweek reported.
A new study in Science challenges long-held theories of why a common virus — cytomegalovirus, or CMV — can reactivate and become a life-threatening infection in people with a compromised immune system, including blood cancer patients undergoing bone marrow transplantation. The discovery, to be published in Science, used a newly developed mouse model and could pave the way for cheaper, safer therapies to protect patients from CMV.
A team of researchers have discovered the interaction between an Ebola virus protein and a protein in human cells that may be an important key to unlocking the pathway of replication of the killer disease in human hosts. Scientists at Texas Biomedical Research Institute were part of a nationwide collaborative with scientists at Gladstone Institutes, UC San Francisco and Georgia State University for a study recently published in the journal Cell.
A cellular protein that interacts with invading viruses appears to help enable the infection process of the Zika virus, according to an international team of researchers who suggest this protein could be a key target in developing new therapies to prevent or treat Zika virus infection. The researchers, who published their findings in Emerging Microbes & Infections, tested this hypothesis by infecting human liver, human nerve and monkey kidney cells with Zika virus.
Only about 16 percent of U.S. adolescents have been fully vaccinated against human papillomavirus (HPV) by the time they turn 13, despite national recommendations that call for vaccination at 11 to 12 years of age. Published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the new findings highlight the need for stronger efforts to encourage HPV vaccination and to improve immunization rates in this key age group.
By studying the impact that NPY and its receptor Y1R have on influenza in mice, the research group led by National Institutes of Biomedical Innovation has now discovered that NPY produced in lung phagocytes can aggravate influenza. Results demonstrate that the induction of suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (SOCS3) via NPY-Y1R activation is responsible for impaired anti-viral response and promoting pro-inflammatory cytokine production, thereby aggravating the influenza virus infection. The group recently published its findings in Nature Microbiology.
Children who receive solid organ transplants are hospitalized due to vaccine-preventable infections at rates that are significantly higher than the general population, according to a newly published study by University of Colorado School of Medicine researchers.
The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, reviewed nearly 7,000 transplant recipients nationally over a seven-year period beginning Jan. 1, 2004, to determine how often they are hospitalized with infections that are typically prevented with vaccines.