Hope – Dr. G.C's Health and Wellness Initiative

In the year 2004, Dr. Choudhuri felt the need to educate and bring awareness among the school children. He founded HOPE initative (Health Oriented Programs and Education) with the aim that if an awareness could be created about basic health practices among the school children, not only would it affect them by making a dent in the basic practices followed in their formative years but also help spread the message in the community at large.

HOPE focuses on 10 common health topics such as life style disorders, sanitation, road traffic accidents, substance abuse, bullying, examination stress etc amongst students using a variety of non-didactic participatory approaches, and attempts to send these messages to the student’s homes too through the school-to -community approach.

So applying this philosophy of School to Community, Dr Choudhuri began working in Uttar Pradesh from November 2004. He was joined by few likeminded citizens, Justice DK Trivedi, Dr UC Ghoshal, Mr Kiron Chopra, Mr Elton D’Souza, Mrs Manju Tayal, Mrs Sandhya Singh and Mrs Surabhi Kapoor who were equally committed to carrying out various health education programmes in schools and colleges in the city, cutting across the social strata.

Hope Initiative spent the first eight years working primarily in Uttar Pradesh serving school children by organising health classes, interactive quizzes and easy to understand books. What started from a class of few students in Lucknow soon spread out to more than 6000 schools touching lives of more than 5 million students and their families directly through programmes and events or by training and equipping teachers to become the “health promoters” of their institutions.

In 2014, Hope Initiative expanded its reach into capital of the country and the same program which had been so successfully run until now in state of Uttar Pradesh is now being followed in the National Capital Region with aid of schools, quizzes etc. Though the geographies have changed, Hope still continues to follow its basic fundamental mission to improve lives of students by helping create awareness, discover, share new information and adopt innovative strategies to promote health of students, their families and society.

Medical Journal

Research Gate

Public Health Issues in Digestive Health: Lessons from the COVID Pandemic

(Talk delivered in national e-Conference of Association of Physicians of India on March 7th, 2021)

One major track-change that the COVID Pandemic has brought about is to shift the focus from individualized precision medicine back to PUBLIC HEALTH, a subject dealing with
- protecting and improving the health of people and their communities.
- by promoting safe behaviour and healthy lifestyles,
- researching disease and injury prevention,
- and detecting, preventing and responding to infectious diseases.

While it is a viral infection this time, following on the heels of its predecessors such as the SARS, swine flu, influenza and other respiratory infections, PUBLIC HEALTH as a science started with a Gastrointestinal infection, namely cholera, in 1854 in a London epidemic, when a doctor (John Snow) was the first to suspect that it could be spreading through infected water.
Infections, be it respiratory, GI (water or food borne), skin are still the typical ones that PUBLIC HEALTH has grown up to address, but has now expanded to 5 more domains:
- Contaminants such as high levels of toxins like arsenic in drinking water
- Occupational : such as those of miners where their eyes and lungs bear the brunt
- Genetic: such as thalassemia
- Accidents: such as road traffic accidents, a leading cause of injuries and death in India
- LIFE STYLE diseases such as obesity, fatty liver, cardiac disease and depression
While COVID pandemic has been dramatic because of the rapidity with which it has spread across the world, a slow simmering one of the “Life-style” variety that has been going on for the last 3 decades is FATYY LIVER disease, a condition characterised excess deposition of fat in the liver
These two seemed to have intersected in recent months. Scientists noted that those with Fatty Liver (often associated with Diabetes, obesity, heart disease) constituting 30% of urban adults, developed more severe disease and had a higher chance of dying when they contracted COVID infection
Commonly referred to as Co-morbidities, the presence of these metabolic “life-style related” diseases made the COVID 19 infection much more deadly.

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