Infographic: Collecting and testing Indian health indicators on a large scale

Illustrated by Adrija Ghosh

In July last year, TheLifeofScience.com helped Faridabad-based Translational Health Science and Technology Institute (THSTI) create a set of comics to highlight some of THSTI’s biggest contributions to India’s public health.

This infographic, third in this series, introduces CNNS – a national level drive to collect data on medical markers. Populations across the world can have varied levels of micronutrients – vitamins and minerals, persistence and prevalence of infections and genetic predisposition to diseases. With knowledge of how these vary for a given ethnicity (often linked to their dietary habits or living conditions), overarching healthcare policies can be tweaked to serve at the community level.

The data on ‘medical markers’ that CNNS is collecting are indicators of health. They are found to be extremely different for geographical regions across developing nations such as India! Not all regions in India will have the same risk for deficiency epidemics and infection breakouts. The devil is in the details. For example, areas with standing water may be more prone to developing protozoan infections, such as malaria. The population inhabiting such a region may also have a prevalence of reduced levels of haemoglobin, the oxygen transporter in human blood, leading to anaemia! This could mean that this particular area needs to explore preventive and curative strategies keeping these two facts in mind.

Here’s how Indian medical scientists are decoding the complex problem of India’s public health!

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Find the other first two infographics in this series below:

1. Clinical trials made easy
2. Lightening India’s IBD Burden

This project was supported by THSTI, Faridabad.