A report by Swachh Bharat Mission says that 74.5 per cent of public places are equipped with toilets. Another report by the Ministry of Jal Shakti states that there are 2.23 lakh Community Sanitary Complexes built across all States and UTs under the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) since October 2014. Over 92 lakh toilets have been constructed since the launch of SBM Gramin (SBM (G)) in April 2020.

While toilets are there, are they accessible? This is the question one should ask. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) focuses on 131 health indicators, but not until the NFHS 5 survey did they include the question of accessibility of toilets in the survey. This happened after the inputs from the Department of Drinking Water and Sanitation (DDWS) and the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare questioned the accessibility.

One might ask, why is the question of accessibility so important? The answer is quite simple. Access to water, sanitation and hygiene is the most basic human need and is also included under the Sustainable Development Goals by the UN.

Are These Numbers Real?

This thought crossed my mind because back in 2021, I went on a solo trip, on a bus to Udaipur from Delhi. There, the bus made two stoppages. This was done so people could get a quick dinner and freshen up, relieve themselves and be prepared for the rest of the journey. This was a nightmare. The bus only stopped for 10 minutes. While some men used the washroom, others went to the bushes.

For the women, there were three cubicles. One of them was broken, and the other one did not have a light bulb, which meant only one was usable. There was a long queue for that cubicle, and time was short. There was no point in trying to find an isolated corner, because it was past midnight, in an unknown area.

I waited anxiously. When finally, my turn came, I saw an overused, dirty washroom. The toilet seat is in a horrible condition. I wanted to touch nothing there. But I had to pee. So, I used my mask to cover my nose from the odour, folded my pants so they did not touch the floor and squatted. It was quite a task to balance.

On my way back to Delhi, I made sure to not drink any water for over a 13-hour bus journey. I dehydrated myself so I did not have to use the washroom. When I did reach, I was severely dehydrated and was sick for three days.

I shared my experience with my friends only to realise that many women have faced the same. There are no washrooms for women.

A friend of mine told me that it is because these roads and dhabas are mainly designed to serve men. They are the ones who travel at night or are on the roads most of the time. As a result, the few women who do travel or are on the road suffer.

Health Risks Women Are Prone To

Well, it is true, but partially. While holding your pee for too long can lead to health risks, peeing on a dirty toilet seat cannot lead to infections unless your urethra is in contact with the bacteria present on that toilet seat. However, nobody wants to sit on a dirty toilet seat, even if you do not get an infection. A safe and hygienic toilet is a basic need.

One of the regular saleswomen, Usha, who visits my house shared her experience with me. “Being on the road constantly means I must use the dirty public washrooms. But I do not want to use them. So, sometimes I ask my regular customers to let me use their washrooms. Some say yes, and some say no. I understand they are also concerned about their safety and privacy,” she says. As a result, Usha spends most of her day not drinking enough water and holding her pee when she is at work. Due to this, she also suffered from a Urinary Tract Infection (UTI).

Her friend, Halima too faced similar problems and due to increased levels of uric acid in her body, she suffered from Hyperuricemia.

Other health risks are kidney stones and other kidney problems, headaches, dull skin, xerostomia or dry mouth, fatigue, and urinary incontinence, which means losing control over your pelvic floor muscles leading to uncontrolled leakage of urine, seizures and weakness.

What Can You Do?

Wear comfortable clothes and capris. Capri pants are comfortable and are short in length, which means this won’t touch the toilet floor when you squat or sit.

Carry Essentials

Even though you cannot get a UTI alone from sitting on a toilet seat, it is always safe to carry a toilet seat sanitiser. If nothing, it can help you get rid of the bad odour so you can use your stand and pee device inside the toilet. You can also use disposable toilet seat covers if your knees are weak, and you cannot squat. Always flush with your seat down.

Always keep disposable gloves, a portable bidet (fill it with water before use), a pocket liquid handwash, wet wipes, tissues and sanitiser handy. Do not forget to keep extra sanitary pads. It might sound a lot, but I promise that it all fits in one pouch. Use this travel-friendly pouch every time you are on the road, or using a public washroom.

What Can We Learn From Others?

However, in case we do not get these technologically advanced toilets here, you can always pack a travel-friendly toilet kit!

For millions of people living with diabetes, the condition is not managed in moments; it is managed in the countless choices made between moments. From planning meals and staying active to monitoring glucose levels and following treatment schedules, people living with diabetes make countless decisions every day that shape their long-term health.

In clinical practice, we often see that the success of treatment is determined not only by how effective a therapy is, but also by whether it can be realistically sustained over years and decades. This is why the future of diabetes care must move beyond advancing therapies alone and focus on developing treatment approaches that are simpler, more flexible, and designed around patients' lives.

Diabetes In India: A Growing Public Health Challenge

Despite being one of the most widely recognized health conditions today, diabetes is still often misunderstood as simply a condition of “high sugar levels”. In reality, it is a metabolic disorder that develops when the body either does not produce enough insulin or is unable to use insulin effectively.

While genetic factors play an important role, rapid urbanization, sedentary lifestyles, changing dietary patterns, and rising obesity have contributed significantly to its increasing prevalence. Today, nearly 101 million adults in India are living with diabetes, according to the ICMR-INDIAB study.

Why Early And Consistent Diabetes Care Matters

With diabetes, time itself becomes a critical risk factor; the longer a person lives with the condition, the more severely it affects multiple organ systems. Diabetes can affect the heart, kidneys and nerves, with complications developing silently over several years. While improvements in the management of key cardiometabolic risk factors such as blood pressure, lipids and glycaemia have helped improve outcomes in several areas, lifestyle-related factors continue to contribute to long-term risks. This highlights the need for early risk identification, timely intervention and continuous monitoring to reduce the long-term burden of disease.

The Daily Burden Of Living With Diabetes

The progressive nature of diabetes also means that care is not limited to clinic visits; it extends into everyday life. It requires individuals to make repeated decisions throughout the day, and this constant cognitive load can become overwhelming, often leading to treatment fatigue and difficulty in maintaining consistent control.

Thus, treatment adherence is one of the strongest determinants of diabetes control. Yet real-world adherence is shaped by multiple overlapping factors. Limited understanding of the disease and its often-silent progression, along with psychological challenges such as anxiety or depression, can affect a person’s ability to remain consistent with treatment.

At the same time, complex treatment regimens, polypharmacy and the long-term burden of managing a chronic condition can make adherence more challenging. Financial constraints, limited access to medicines, and gaps in regular follow-up and patient–provider communication further add to the difficulties of sustained diabetes management.

Together, these factors contribute to poorer glycemic control, higher complication rates, increased hospitalizations and reduced quality of life.

Innovations Are Transforming Diabetes Care

Recognizing the realities of living with diabetes, care has increasingly shifted towards approaches that balance clinical effectiveness with practicality in everyday life, with greater emphasis on long-term sustainability and individual patient needs. Supporting this shift is a new generation of innovations in diabetes care that is making it more personalized, flexible and easier to manage, including:

Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) has helped shift focus from HbA1c alone to include dynamic measures such as Time in Range (TIR) and glucose variability, enabling more real-time, personalized adjustments.

Oral therapies such as DPP-4 inhibitors (gliptins) and SGLT2 inhibitors (gliflozins) have expanded treatment options by helping improve glucose control while supporting more personalized and holistic diabetes management.

Newer ultra-long-acting basal insulins and ultra-rapid-acting mealtime insulins have improved glycemic stability.

Once-Weekly Insulin: A New Option For Patients

More recently, innovative solutions like once-weekly insulin icodec have been available globally that offer a simplified regimen, reduced treatment burden and improved patient adherence. This weekly insulin is now approved and launched in India for adults living with diabetes. This novel therapy could potentially reduce the practical burden of treatment and make long-term management more achievable in real-world settings.

Ultimately, the future of diabetes care will not be defined by how strictly patients follow treatment schedules, but by how well treatment fits into their lives. When care is designed around patients rather than systems, adherence becomes more natural, outcomes improve more sustainably, and diabetes management becomes less about daily struggle and more about improving the quality of life for those with diabetes.

A team of UK scientists has developed a non-invasive brush biopsy test that can detect oral cancer within just 60 minutes, potentially transforming the way the disease is diagnosed.

Researchers from Queen Mary University of London say the test could prevent more than 90% of unnecessary scalpel biopsies, reducing pain, infection risk and diagnostic delays. The findings were published in the journal Biomarker Research.

Early diagnosis of oral squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is critical. However, most oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMDs) are benign, meaning many patients undergo invasive scalpel biopsies that ultimately show no cancer.

These procedures can be painful, carry a risk of infection and, in areas such as the gums, can be difficult to perform and may damage the underlying tooth or bone.

Beyond diagnosis, researchers say the test could also help monitor patients with persistent OPMDs over time. Because the test is non-invasive and repeatable, it can be used for regular surveillance, improving the chances of detecting malignant transformation at an early stage, when treatment is most likely to be successful.

How Does The Brush Test Work?

The newly developed brush biopsy requires only a simple swab of the mouth, without removing any tissue. According to the researchers, the test can identify low-risk patients and potentially spare more than 90% of them from unnecessary invasive tissue biopsies. Another advantage is speed—the results are available within one hour.

"This test gives clinicians a rapid, accurate, and non-invasive way to triage patients, and crucially, it can be repeated. That means we can now monitor patients with persistent pre-malignant lesions regularly and systematically — and pick up cancers much earlier than we would have been able to before," said Muy-Teck Teh, Professor of Molecular Oral Oncology at Queen Mary.

How Was The Study Conducted?

The study is the largest of its kind, involving more than 1,000 samples from 545 patients. The team collected brush biopsies from the mouths of 545 patients with lesions that could potentially be cancerous.

The test was found to have an overall accuracy of 95.5 percent, with false-positive and false-negative rates of less than 5 percent. The results were available within an hour.

The latest study builds on an earlier version of the test, qMIDS-V2, which required a 1 mm microbiopsy and had already been validated using more than 530 samples from the UK, India and China.

The new qMIDS-V3 requires only a brush swab of the mouth, with no tissue removal, yet achieves test performance comparable to its microbiopsy predecessor.

Oral Cancer Remains A Growing Global Burden

According to Global Burden of Disease data, lip and oral cancer are among the world's fastest-growing causes of early death.

More than 10,000 people in the UK were diagnosed with oral cancer last year, while 3,637 people died from the disease, according to the charity Mouth Cancer.

Worldwide, oral cancer affects around 650,000 people every year. Major risk factors include tobacco use, smoking, alcohol, HPV infection and sun damage. More than 53% of mouth cancers are diagnosed at Stage IV, when the disease is at its most advanced.

What does it take to become a CEO? Decades of hustle and hard work. J Michael Prince, CEO of US Polo Assn., probably had the same idea. But after years of toiling away, he landed at a startling realization – he could have done it all without pushing himself to the limit. He recently opened up about the importance of work-life balance and setting aside time for yourself at the end of the day.

Work-Life Balance And Burnout

In a conversation with Fortune, Prince said that he now makes a conscious effort to avoid contacting his employees outside office hours unless it’s an emergency.

He said, “One thing I try to respect is—and this never really happened to me throughout my career—unless there’s something major going on, I try to leave people alone in the evenings, so you rarely ever get an email or text from me after the office.”

He spoke about the importance of personal time and allowing oneself to reset after a workday. “I leave the office, and I really try to respect people’s weekends, because I feel like that’s your family time, that’s your personal time, that’s your friendship time, that’s your time to reset, recharge spiritually, mentally, physically, emotionally,” he added.

HealthandMe spoke to Dr. Samant Darshi, Consultant- Psychiatrist & Neuromodulation Expert, Director - Psymate Healthcare, Noida, about the importance of maintaining work-life balance to prevent burnout.

Read more: Doctors Day: From Burnout To Work Anxiety, The Mental Health Struggle Doctors Rarely Talk About

The expert says that it is necessary to maintain a balance between work and life since it helps in enhancing health and well-being, reduces stress, increases productivity, and develops meaningful relationships. Maintaining a balance would lead to higher job satisfaction and happiness in life.

Dr Darshi says, “Work-life imbalance increases levels of stress and anxiety and causes emotional exhaustion. Persistent stress can result in depression, insomnia, hypertension, decreased immunity, and cardiovascular diseases. Lack of rest and time for leisure activities causes a loss of concentration and low self-esteem, thus making everyday life more stressful and challenging.”

Tackling Burnout

Prince admitted he didn’t always give importance to work-life balance. Earlier in his career, he regularly worked 90-hour weeks, stayed up through the night, and rarely slowed down. Looking back, he said he could have achieved the same goals without sacrificing so much of his health and time.

Prince said, “I could have eaten differently, I could have been a little more thoughtful about my sleep, about my routine around working out, my travel.”

According to Dr Darshi, work-life imbalance leads to a feeling of burnout. Experiencing constant stress, unrealistic expectations, and lack of time for leisure gradually exhausts physical and emotional resources. Eventually, motivation tanks, productivity drops, fatigue, detachment, frustration, and inability to function increase.

He explains, “Burnout adversely impacts the mental state of an individual by causing symptoms such as emotional fatigue, anxiety, depression, irritability, and hopelessness. It causes demotivation and loss of focus in addition to making individuals feel insecure. If not addressed, it may adversely impact personal relationships, affect work, and cause chronic health conditions.”