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By Archana Shukla BBC Business Correspondent Edited by Amal Udawatta Image caption, Harshini with her baby Nitisha cannot play as much as she used to. The three-year-old is losing weight and complains of leg pains and weakness. The doctor's diagnosis is clear - Nitisha is underfed and malnourished. But the treatment suggested is difficult to come by for her family - wholesome meals. Like many people in Sri Lanka, this family from a tea estate village in Hanthana, in the centre of the country, have seen their finances collapse. "We manage two meals a day and it's the same thing - rice with potatoes or lentils. We can't afford anything else," says Harshini, Nitisha's mother. For weeks, the family has not had milk or eggs, she added. Harshini's younger daughter - just a month old - was also born underweight. The baby lacks thyroxine, a key growth hormone. The child joins the growing list of infants born with low birth weight - a direct impact of depleting ges

  By Michelle Roberts Digital health editor, Edited by Amal Udawatta . Digital health editor IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES The Covid virus can reside on some ready-to-eat groceries for days, UK experts have confirmed. Scientists carried out tests for the  Food Standards Agency (FSA),  purposely smearing the virus on to packaging and food products, including fruit, pastries and bottled drinks. They chose items that people might put in their mouth without cooking or washing. The risk to consumers remains very low, they say. Their report says it should be noted that "foods and packaging considered as part of this study were artificially inoculated with Sars-Cov-2 and therefore are not a reflection of contamination levels found on these foods at retail, and lower levels of contamination will require less time to decline to undetectable levels." 'Noteworthy' findings . The Covid virus can reside on some ready-to-eat groceries for days, UK experts have confirmed. Scientists ca

 From  BBC News, By Michelle Roberts Digital health editor Edited by Amal Udawatta, IMAGE SOURCE, GETTY IMAGES Scientists say they have made a breakthrough designing a vaccine against all 20 known types of flu. It uses the same messenger-ribonucleic-acid (mRNA) technology as successful Covid vaccines. Flu mutates and the current annual jab is updated to ensure the best match for the sort circulating but would probably not protect against new pandemic types. The new vaccine triggered high levels of antibodies, in tests on ferrets and mice, that could fight a broad range. The antigens it contains - safe copies of recognisable bits of all 20 known subtypes of influenza A and B viruses - can teach the immune system how to fight them and, hopefully, any new strain that could spark a pandemic, the researchers say, in the journal  Science . "The idea here is to have a vaccine that will give people a baseline level of immune memory to diverse flu strains," Dr Scott Hensley, one of th