Public Health

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The One Health framework that espouses an integrated approach for protecting the health of humans, animals and the environment is the need of the hour. The legally binding International Health Regulations (2005) is an existing powerful legislation that can bridge the gap between and among sectors for the realisation of the One Health approach in India.

Universalising Healthcare in India: From Care to Coverage edited by Imrana Qadeer, K B Saxena and P M Arathi, Delhi: Aakar Books, 2019; pp 475, `1,495.

There is a dearth of literature about fi scal marksmanship beyond total revenue expenditures and defi cits at the central or state level. It is of utmost importance to elicit a debate on the budgetary discipline around micro variables. These micro-level deviations result in macro-level errors in budget forecasting. The article explores state-level fi scal marksmanship in the context of medical and public health expenditure over the period—2002 to 2017. The deviations in capital health spending are high compared to those in revenue health spending. This may have an impact on the improvement in health over the long term.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen some Asian countries employ sophisticated mass-surveillance technologies—normally employed to gather intelligence for domestic security purposes—to contain the spread of infection in their populations. There has also been an intrusion of military and allied national security actors into the traditionally civilian domain of public health, in the form of disease surveillance. These emerging developments in the pandemic response provide a pretext for a limited historical review, beginning from World War II to the present, centred on the intersection between infectious disease surveillance and control, national security, and military in the Western world.