Heena Sharma Blog

  Scientists have found the likely order in which Covid-19 symptoms first appear, an advance that may help clinicians rule out other diseases, and help patients seek care promptly or decide sooner to self-isolate. According to the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, the likely order of symptoms in patients with Covid-19 is fever, followed by cough, muscle pain, and then nausea, and/or vomiting, and diarrhea. "This order is especially important to know when we have overlapping cycles of illnesses like the flu that coincide with infections of Covid-19," explained study co-author Peter Kuhn, a professor of medicine and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US. With this new information, Kuhn said doctors can determine what steps to take to care for patients, and prevent their condition from worsening. Read More               

In 2016, almost 261,000 Indian children died before their fifth birthday due to diarrhoea or pneumonia , both preventable diseases. This is the highest toll taken anywhere in the world by the two diseases--a fifth of their global burden--according to the 2018 Pneumonia & diarrhoea Progress Report, released on November 12, 2018, which was World Pneumonia Day . This means that about 735 Indian children died everyday of either disease in 2016--one child every two minutes. Globally, pneumonia and diarrhoea cause a quarter of deaths in children under five and fighting them together can drastically reduce child mortality across the world. India has had mixed success in the prevention, control and treatment of diarrhoea and pneumonia in the year to 2016: Immunisation coverage improved but there was a decline in treatment indicators, said the report by the International Vaccine Access Center, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. This report analyses how effectiv