NIRASIYA BAI'S three sons are used to their mother fainting every other week. They keep pieces of shakkar (jaggery) handy and place it swiftly under her tongue, every time she feels dizzy or is on the verge of collapse. In March alone, she fainted thrice. The 52-year-old resident of Shivtarai village in Chattisgarh’s Bilaspur district suffers from diabetes. In 2010, when she was diagnosed with the condition, her blood sugar levels were well beyond the normal range —297 milligrams per decilitre (mg/ dl) in fasting and 361 mg/dl, two hours after food. When Down To Earth (DTE) met Nirasiya in March, her blood sugar levels were under control. But she appeared frail and lacked energy to participate even in the routine agricultural activities she used to do until a few years ago.
DTE visited other families in this village of Gond tribal community, and almost every other household had a similar story to narrate. The situation appears no better in neighbouring villages of Shivtarai in Kota block. Data shared by the district's health office shows that the community health centre (CHC) at Kota has diagnosed 922 new diabetes patients between April 2022 and February 2023. As many as 1,063 people have also been found suffering from hypertension.
What is even more perplexing is that Kota, as informed by Anil Kumar Shriwastawa, chief medical and health officer of Bilaspur, is home to a majority of the district's tribal population, and non-communicable diseases (NCDS) like diabetes have so far been believed to be rare among these communities.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 01, 2023 من Down To Earth.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة May 01, 2023 من Down To Earth.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
The Pill That's Roiling US Drug Regulation
The hard right is challenging FDA's authority to regulate drugs with its lawsuit to ban America's most used abortion pill
TURN OVER A NEW LEAF
The young leaves of pilkhan free are a worthy alternative to leafy vegetables in the spring season
FAIR PRICE
Using a calculator, Uttar Pradesh scientifically fixes fee for transporting faecal sludge to treatment plants
THE FOREVER POLLUTANT
From production to usage to disposal, plastic is a threat to those who come in its contact SIDDHARTH GHANSHYAM SINGH
Seeds from the past
For a decade,200 villages in Odisha have conserved and grown 190 indigenous rice and millet varieties with proven climate resilience
TESTING TIMES
While the world is trying to identify uniform tests to measure soil biodiversity, it still needs investment and infrastructure to make them available to all
BREAKING NEW GROUND
Soil health is typically measured by its nutrient content, by presence of elements like nitrogen and phosphorus. No country in the world measures it in terms of soil biodiversity-a counting of underground faunal populations and microorganisms.
PRIME TRIGGER
Heat stress dominates debate on the causes of a mysterious chronic kidney disease that continues to baffle health experts and is on the rise globally
Coral catastrophe
Consistent ocean heating puts global corals at risk of mass bleaching in 2024
CHIPKO A DISTANT MEMORY
Whenever a dictionary of green terms is written, no matter in what language, it will contain at least one Hindi word-Chipko, which means to hug.