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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.

Showing 4 of 7 articles, those that changed from 1 July to 30 September 2026.Show all

Fluorosis

Prelims and Mains

Fluorosis is the harm done to the teeth and the bone by years of drinking groundwater that carries fluoride.

It 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.

Dental fluorosis

Mottles and pits tooth enamel

Skeletal fluorosis

Builds up in bone over years
Bones turn dense and brittle, joints stiff

From the Press Information Bureau (PIB) release, 9 September 2026

What changed

9 Sep 2026
- The remedy is safe water: either a source carrying less fluoride, or taking the fluoride 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.
- The National Programme for Prevention and Control of Fluorosis is the health system's side of the answer, alongside safe water.
PIB, 9 Sep 2026: Union Health Ministry Organises National Multi-Stakeholder Workshop on Fluorosis on National Fluorosis Day (opens in a new tab)

National Family Health Survey 6

Prelims and Mains

The National Family Health Survey is India's periodic household survey of health, nutrition and fertility; the sixth round covers 2023 to 24.

NFHS 5 and NFHS 6

	NFHS 5	NFHS 6 (2023 to 2024)
Indicators	131	101
Anaemia and haemoglobin	measured, from finger or heel prick blood	dropped
Mortality, sex ratio, sanitation, clean fuel, registration	reported	dropped
Malaria testing	measured, from dried blood spots	dropped
Non communicable disease biomarkers	measured	some kept
External support	technical and financial support from outside, including the Demographic and Health Surveys Programme	none: run by the International Institute for Population Sciences alone

NFHS 6 dropped 30 indicators, among them the anaemia, mortality and sanitation measures that schemes are judged by.Source: Frontline, 23 June 2026

What changed

24 Jul 2026
- Institutional deliveries rose to 90.6 per cent and full immunisation of children aged 12 to 23 months to 87.1 per cent.
- Stunting among children under five fell to 29.3 per cent.
- Against this, 30.7 per cent of women and 27.3 per cent of men aged 15 to 49 are now overweight or obese.
Mains: India now carries a double burden of undernutrition and metabolic disease.
PIB, 24 Jul 2026: NFHS-6 Highlights Rising lifestyle diseases among Adults (opens in a new tab)
23 Jun 2026
- The factsheets came about two years after fieldwork ended.
- They cover fewer indicators than NFHS 5, and the International Institute for Population Sciences ran the survey for the first time without external technical or financial support.
- The total fertility rate held at 2.0.
Mains: The omissions remove the evidence needed to judge Anaemia Mukt Bharat, Poshan Abhiyaan, Swachh Bharat and Ujjwala, and the Sample Registration System cannot substitute because it is only a sample survey.
Frontline, 23 Jun 2026: What NFHS-6 doesn't tell us (opens in a new tab)

Codex Alimentarius Commission

Prelims

Codex is the joint food standards body of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, whose standards are the reference for food trade under the World Trade Organization.

What changed

14 Jul 2026BriefThe 49th session adopted seven standards steered by India, including dried coriander seeds, fresh curry leaves, vanilla and large cardamom, and approved new work on cashew kernels. PIB, 14 Jul 2026: Seven India-led Codex Texts including standards for Dried Coriander Seeds and Fresh Curry Leaves adopted; Commission Approves India’s proposal to develop Codex standard for Cashew Kernels (opens in a new tab)

Cancer

Cancer: notification and the global count

Prelims and Mains

Making cancer a notifiable disease obliges doctors and hospitals to report every case to the State.

Notification fills the gap left by cancer registries that cover only about 10 to 16 per cent of the population.
The Centre holds that notification is meant for communicable diseases.
The World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Cancer gives the global count and shows the survival gap between rich and poor countries.

What changed

8 Jul 2026New
- Telangana became the seventeenth State to make cancer notifiable.
- The WHO report estimates about 20.6 million new cases and close to 10 million deaths a year, rising to about 35 million cases by 2050.
- Five year survival from breast cancer is about 87 per cent in high income countries against about 42 per cent in low income countries.
Mains: the survival gap is largely a matter of price and access, which is the case for using compulsory licensing.
The Hindu, 4 Jul 2026: Counting cancer (opens in a new tab) · The Hindu, 8 Jul 2026 · The Indian Express, 20 Jul 2026: WHO's Global Status Report on Cancer puts the inequity in survival, not in incidence (opens in a new tab)