శ్రీ కౌముది ఫిబ్రవరి 2021

 

Dirty air and lost pregnancies in South Asia

 

 

 

 

 

Mothers in India discuss breastfeeding. (Credit: Russell Watkins/Department for International Development)   

Jan 07, 2021

Particulate matter pollution in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh could be behind hundreds of thousands of stillbirths and miscarriages annually, according to a new study.

Brian Bienkowski

More than 349,000 lost pregnancies each year in South Asia are linked to excessive air pollution, according to a new study in The Lancet Planetary Health journal.

The research builds on previous evidence that small particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) can harm developing fetuses. The study is the first to estimate the air pollution burden on South Asian women and suggests that the excessive pollution may be responsible for up to 7 percent of pregnancy loss in the region from 2000 to 2016.

"South Asia has the highest burden of pregnancy loss globally and is one of the most PM2.5 polluted regions in the world," lead author, Dr. Tao Xue, a researcher at China's Peking University, said in a statement. "Poor air quality could be responsible for a considerable burden of pregnancy loss in the region."

Xue and colleagues collected health and household survey data from 1998-2016 from women in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh who had at least one lost pregnancy and one livebirth. They also estimated the women's exposure to PM2.5.

PM2.5 consists of toxic airborne particles much tinier than the width of a human hair, and is linked to a variety of health impacts including respiratory and heart problems, and altered brain development for children. It also affects proper development of the embryo in mothers' wombs and, along with other pollutants such as carbon monoxide, has been associated with stillbirths and spontaneous abortions.

They modeled the risk for each woman for every 10 micrograms per cubic meter increase of PM2.5, and used this risk to look at the whole region from 2000 to 2016, estimating how many lost pregnancies could have been prevented with cleaner air.

Each 10 microgram per cubic meter increase in PM2.5 was linked to a 3 percent increase in the likelihood of a lost pregnancy, with the greatest risk for older women, those in rural areas, or young women from large cities. The researchers estimate for every year from 2000 to 2016 about 349,681 lost pregnancies were associated with air pollution exceeding India's regulatory standards for PM2.5. This represents 7 percent of the total lost pregnancies in the region over that period.

When air pollution exceeded the more rigorous World Health Organization standards, such exposure was linked to 29 percent of the pregnancy losses.

"Our findings suggest that a considerable proportion of the pregnancy loss burden in South Asia is attributable to exposure to ambient PM2.5 and that improving air quality would promote maternal and infant health globally," the authors wrote.

Previous studies have found similar associations between air pollution and lost pregnancies in California, other parts of the U.S., China, and Africa. However, there's been less data on South Asia, even though it has the highest rate of pregnancy loss in the world. From 2010 to 2015, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh combined for 25 percent of all babies born globally, but accounted for 35 percent (917,800) of stillbirths across the globe.

The impact goes beyond lost pregnancies—a study last month found India's air pollution resulted in 1.67 million deaths in 2019, the largest such toll on the planet.

The new study was limited in that they weren't able to differentiate between natural pregnancy loss and abortions, there could have been bias in women's reporting because of stigma.

However, the implications are enormous, the authors warned, and branch into mental health problems and gender inequality.

"We know losing a pregnancy can have mental, physical and economic effects on women, including increased risk of postnatal depressive disorders, infant mortality during subsequent pregnancy, and increase the costs related to pregnancy, such as loss of labor," co-author Dr. Tianjia Guan from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College, said in statement.

"Therefore, reducing pregnancy loss may also lead to improvements in gender equality."

Source: ehn.org

The Political Fix: Why is BJP treating the Supreme Court like a tie-breaker for the farmers protest?

A newsletter on Indian politics and policy from Scroll.in.

Rohan Venkataramakrishnan

The Big Story: Policy by proxy

As 2021 gets under way, after 45 days in the cold and despite eight rounds of talks with the government, tens of thousands of farmers continue their demonstration on the borders of Delhi. The farmers are protesting three agricultural laws passed in controversial manner by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government that seek to deregulate portions of the farming sector.

While the government sold the laws as reforms that would liberate and energise Indian agriculture, the protesters saw them as a gateway to a corporate takeover of farming. The subsequent pushback led to one long-time political ally of the BJP quitting the government and prompted thousands of protesters – Mint says the number is around 200,000 – making their way to the borders of the capital.

For background on the farmer protests, read our earlier articles:

    What you need to know about the chaos in the Rajya Sabha over the farm bills

    Three ways to understand the massive farmer protests taking on Modi in Delhi

    What unites protesting farmers and critics of RBI’s corporate banks proposal?

The protests managed to extract significant concessions from the government in the first two weeks after they began.

But the farmers have been steadfast in their demand that the laws be completely repealed. They are represented by a collection of farm leaders who managed to put aside their other disagreements and profit from a mistake – when Haryana farm leader Gurnam Singh Chaduni broke through police barricades instead of settling at the Haryana-Punjab border as planned.

The eighth round of talks, held on January 8 between the 41-member delegation of protestors and several Union ministers, was a clear indication of just how deadlocked the issue remains.

First, the ministers kept the farm leaders waiting for a half hour, as they have routinely done during negotiations. When talks began, the farmers restated their demand for a full repeal. The government refused. Union Minister Narendra Singh Tomar claimed that not all farmers were against the laws – and so the ones who are protesting should stand down.

What followed was heated tempers and raised voices, and no resolution in sight. The farm leaders left, agreeing only to meet again on January 15.

Reports suggested the government did make two proposals to break the deadlock. One was to set up a small informal committee with representatives from both sides that would draw up a non-binding proposal for a way forward. The farmers had already rejected this, demanding that the laws should be repaled before any discussions on how agricultural policy should proceed.

The other was to use the Supreme Court – which is taking up the matter on Monday – as a sort of tiebreaker.

Read full article: scrollin

శ్రీ కౌముది జనవరి 2021

జన్మదిన ప్రత్యేక సంచిక

 

శ్రీ కౌముది డిసెంబర్ 2020

శ్రీ కౌముది నవంబర్ 2020

 

In the midst of profound grief, Hindu rituals taught me to let go

RELIGIOUS MATTERS

Rituals can hold the core beliefs of a culture and provide a sense of control in an otherwise helpless situation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chandan Khanna/AFP

Ketika Garg, The Conversation

Cultures have built elaborate rituals to help humans process the grief of losing someone.

Rituals can hold the core beliefs of a culture and provide a sense of control in an otherwise helpless situation. I came to understand this when I lost my mother last year and participated in the primary Hindu rituals of death and grief.

The cultural practices and experiences helped me find meaning in my loss.

Body and soul

Many Eastern religions do not bury their dead, instead, they cremate them. Most Hindus consider this to be the final sacrifice of a person.

The Sanskrit word for death, “dehanta,” means “the end of body” but not the end of life. One of the central tenets of Hindu philosophy is the distinction between a body and a soul. Hindus believe that the body is a temporary vessel for an immortal soul in the mortal realm. When we die, our physical body perishes but our soul lives on.

The soul continues its journey of birth, death and rebirth, in perpetuity until final liberation. This is at the heart of the philosophy of detachment and learning to let go of desires.

Scholars of Indian philosophy have argued about the importance of cultivating detachment in the Hindu way of life. An ultimate test of detachment is the acceptance of death.

Hindus believe that the soul of the deceased stays attached to its body even after its demise, and by cremating the body, it can be set free. As a final act, a close family member forcefully strikes the burning corpse’s skull with a stick as if to crack it open and release the soul.

To fully liberate the soul of its mortal attachments, the ashes and remaining bone fragments of the deceased are then dispersed in a river or ocean, usually at a historically holy place, like the banks of the River Ganges.

Knowledge within rituals

Someone from a different tradition might wonder why a ritual should ask mourners to destroy the body of their loved ones and dispose of their remains when one should be caring for all that remains of the dead?

As shocking as it was, it forced me to understand that the burning corpse is only a body, not my mother, and I have no connection left to the body. My PhD studies in cognitive sciences, a field that seeks to understand how our behaviour and thinking are influenced by interactions between brain, body, environment and culture, made me look beyond the rituals. It made me understand their deeper relevance and question my experiences.

Rituals can help us understand concepts that are otherwise elusive to grasp. For example, scholar Nicole Boivin describes the importance of physical doorways in rituals of social transformation, like marriage, in some cultures. The experience of moving through doorways evokes transition and creates an understanding of change.

 

 

The author with her mother at the beach in the city of Puri in 1998. Photo credit: Arun Garg, CC BY

Through the rituals, ideas that were abstract until then, such as detachment, became accessible to me.

The concept of detachment to the physical body is embodied in the Hindu death rituals.

Cremation creates an experience that represents the end of the deceased’s physical body. Further, immersing ashes in a river symbolises the final detachment with the physical body as flowing water takes the remains away from the mortal world.

Dealing with the death of a loved one can be incredibly painful, and it also confronts one with the specter of mortality. The ritual of liberating the soul of the dead from its attachments is also a reminder to those left behind to let go of the attachment to the dead.

For it is the living who must learn to let go of the attachment to the dead, not the long-gone soul. Cultural rituals can widen one’s views when it is difficult to see past the grief.

Standing at a place where millions before me had come and gone, where my ancestors performed their rites, I let go of my mother’s final remains in the holy waters of the river Ganges.

Watching them float away with the waves of the ancient river helped me recognise that this was not the end but a small fragment in the bigger circle of life.

As the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita – The Song of God – says of the soul,

It is not born, it does not die;

Having been, it will never not be.

Unborn, eternal, constant and primordial;

It is not killed, when the body is killed.

Ketika Garg is a PhD Student of Cognitive Science, University of California, Merced.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

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Source: scrollin