Good morning. Today: a gynaecologist sued over a baby’s hands who walked out of it on the strength of one thirty-day prescription, the last MDS counselling round closing this week, and an air reading from a town you have never seen on a pollution bulletin, which should embarrass every Delhi headline you have read this month.
— DR. ADITYA SETH, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
01 · THE LEAD
MEDICOLEGAL
The anomaly scan is done between 18 and 22 weeks. She was not in the clinic for any of them.
She was expecting her first child and had come to her mother’s town for the delivery, which is how a local gynaecologist came to be her doctor. There were three scans in all: one about a week after her first visit, one at 22 weeks and 4 days, and a third late in the pregnancy. Every report said the baby was growing normally. Her son was born by normal delivery, and the palms and fingers of both hands had not developed fully.
The couple argued the reports had taken a decision away from them: had they known, they would have ended the pregnancy. What undid the case was a prescription written at 15 to 16 weeks, covering thirty days of medicines. The commission read that as a doctor expecting her back in a month, and she did not come back until that second scan. The guideline the couple filed themselves says plainly that counting fingers is not required on a routine mid-trimester scan. They called no expert. The complaint failed, with no order on costs.
WHY IT MATTERS
Write the next visit date and the anomaly-scan week on the antenatal prescription itself, and record a missed visit when it happens. That paper did more work here than any scan image.
The guideline asks you to document that both arms, hands, legs and feet are present. A foetus keeps its fingers in a fist, which is why they are not countable.
Termination for foetal abnormality stopped at 20 weeks when this pregnancy ran and now goes to 24, so booking early in the window leaves room for a targeted repeat.
02 · EXAMS AND ADMISSIONS
290 seats are left for Round 3, and registration closes at 3 pm on Tuesday
Only 43 of them are government Open seats with no PwD tag, and six of the nine branches have no government EWS seat left at all. Oral Pathology has the most going spare, 54, and it also moved furthest between rounds, 113 ranks deeper. Choice locking ends at 11:55 pm on Wednesday. The branch-by-category planner is in the piece.
03 · CLINICAL
One in five put down every hepatitis B drug they were on and were still clear six months later
The FDA cleared GSK’s bepirovirsen on 20 October, and nobody on placebo came close. Who qualifies is narrow: six months of a daily antiviral first, surface antigen at 3000 IU/mL or below, no cirrhosis. WHO’s last count put about 29.8 million Indians living with hepatitis B, and fewer than one in twenty people with the chronic infection anywhere are on any treatment at all, so for most of ours the obstacle is still that first antiviral. The boxed warning is the part to read twice.
04 · AIR QUALITY
EndorphinMD — Air Quality block
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The air your patients walked through this morning
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Live AQI, 25 October 2026. Both charts share one scale, 0 to 400, so the bars can be read against each other.
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Now the five worst readings in the country, on the same axis.
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WORST IN INDIA RIGHT NOW
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BAND
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| Muzaffarpur |
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313 |
Hazardous |
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Three of the five are district towns in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. None of them has a single air-quality bulletin on the evening news, and all of them have a paediatric OPD.
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ENDORPHINMD
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Half the children in one western UP survey had TB infection by their early teens
The scar on your arm protects babies against the forms of TB that kill them and does very little for the adults doing the transmitting. A new perspective in Indian Pediatrics works through why a hundred-year-old vaccine is still the one nobody can drop, and what might replace it.
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