IVF doctor gives hope to older Indian women NEW YORK: Also:

‘Nations ill-prepared to battle pandemic diseases’

ELLENABAD, India, May 25, To see Manjeet Kaur around her little daughter is to see joy at its purest.

The 15-month-old toddles about the sprawling courtyard of her parents’ farm, her oily curls tied up in a top knot, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking. Kaur’s eyes don’t miss a thing, and they often mist up with tears.

Gurjeet is the child Kaur yearned for desperately, after 40 years of being that thing which a rural Indian woman dreads more than almost anything else — barren. She gave birth at 58 years old, with help from a controversial IVF clinic in this corner of north India that specializes in fertility treatments for women over 50.

Such treatments have become more common across the world, and they strike a cultural chord in India, where a woman is often defined by her ability to be a wife and mother. While there are no reliable statistics for how many Indian women undergo fertility treatments each year at what age, tens of thousands of IVF clinics have sprouted up in the country over the last decade.

Fertility specialists say pregnancies like Kaur’s are troubling because of the potential health risks and the concern that the parents may not live long enough to raise their babies to adulthood. Legislation is pending in India’s Parliament setting 50 as the legal upper age cap.

But Dr. Anurag Bishnoi, the driving force behind the National Fertility and Test Tube Baby Centre in Hisar, harbors no such worries. His clinic’s website home page is dominated by photographs of patients who carried babies to term at ages well beyond what most other doctors anywhere in the world may permit. At least two of his patients gave birth at 70.

For Kaur, it’s simple enough.

Bishnoi made her belong.

Most of the world is failing to invest enough money to prevent the potential global spread of disease that could kill millions of people and cripple economies, the World Bank said on Thursday.

Faced with a pandemic, an unprepared planet could lose billions to trillions of dollars, a significant chunk of the global gross domestic product, it said in a report.

Yet containing pandemics — diseases that spread globally compared with epidemics that are localized — would cost about $1 per person per year in investment, the Bank said.

“Given the scale of risk to human lives and livelihoods, the investment case for financing preparedness is compelling,” said Peter

Sands, chairman of the Bank’s Working Group on Financing Preparedness which wrote the report.