Science and Technology › Health and disease
Non communicable diseases, nutrition and food safety
Diseases that are not caught from others, nutrition and food safety: cancers, diabetes, heart disease, inherited blood disorders, diseases carried in drinking water such as fluorosis, fortification, food labelling and tobacco. Prelims has asked about fluoride among the pollutants in India's drinking water.
9 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Fluorosis
Fluorosis is not a poisoning that arrives from a factory: the fluoride is in the rock the groundwater passes through, so a village can drink it for years with nothing having gone wrong upstream. India's groundwater fluoride is largely geogenic, and the harm it does over years of drinking is read in two places, the teeth and the bone.
Dental fluorosis
- Mottles and pits tooth enamel
Skeletal fluorosis
- Builds up in bone over years
- Bones turn dense and brittle, joints stiff
9 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
Defluoridation
The remedy is safe water, not treatment. Either the supply is switched to a source carrying less fluoride, or the fluoride is taken out of the water there is, which is defluoridation.
- IS 10500, the Bureau of Indian Standards drinking water standard, sets 1.0 mg per litre as the acceptable fluoride limit, relaxed to 1.5 where no other source exists.
- The National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) developed the Nalgonda technique, a low cost community defluoridation method.
9 Sep 2026 · Prelims and Mains
National Programme for Prevention and Control of Fluorosis
The programme is where the health system's side of the answer sits, alongside the water that has to be made safe. What was asked of it in September 2026 was reach.
- The Health Ministry held a national multi-stakeholder workshop on National Fluorosis Day to strengthen the programme and widen its reach.