Indian government plans to launch National Urban Health Mission to complement rural program

Building on its seven-year-old National Rural Health Mission (NRHM), India's government plans to launch the National Urban Health Mission (NUHM), which "will focus on improving health care delivery and public health systems," the Lancet reports. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recently "expressed hope that the two programs together will in the future lead to a unified National Health Mission," according to the journal. "Unplanned urbanization brings forth a whole set of new health problems. [The] urban poor are three times more likely to die before attaining the age of five years, 20 times more likely not to have any antenatal care, three times less likely to get primary immunization, and two and a half to three times more likely to be stunted and wasted than urban richest," Chandrakant Pandav, head of the Centre for Community Medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, said, citing the third National Family Health Survey, the Lancet notes (Bhaumik, 8/11).