Urvashi Prasad, Editor in Chief of the Global South Healthcare Journal and Visiting Senior Fellow at IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, shared a post on LinkedIn:
”I never smoked. Delhi’s air still gave me Stage 4 lung cancer.
India has a public health narrative problem. We have built an entire architecture of health messaging around lifestyle – diet, exercise, sleep, stress. All of it is useful. None of it is sufficient when the air itself is the pathogen, the carcinogen.
You cannot exercise your way out of PM2.5. You cannot eat your way out of a city where 1 in 3 children already show measurable lung damage.
Environment is now India’s biggest public health crisis – and it remains systematically undernamed, even denied, in policy, in media, and in clinical practice.
Here is the signal I find most clarifying: overseas VC and PE funds are flooding Indian hospital infrastructure, and cancer care in particular.
I want to be precise about what that means. It does not mean India’s health system is succeeding. It means capital has looked at the trajectory of disease burden in this country and decided there is significant money to be made from treating it.
When investors build their return models on a population getting sicker, that is not a market opportunity. That is a policy failure, priced in.
We are not at the point of no return. But the window for course correction is not indefinite.
In this podcast, I speak about my own diagnosis, the science of how air pollution triggers cancer at the cellular level, and what an honest 3-point policy response actually looks like.
The question is whether we are willing to treat the environment as the public health emergency it already is.
