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January 01, 2010
The pharmaceutical industry spends a significant amount of resources on marketing its products. According to one estimate, the top 50 companies in India alone spent Rs 5,340 crore in 2004 on drug promotion, spending 290% to 1,025% more on marketing than on research and development. The interactio...
January 01, 2010
Development of vaccines is a priceless gift from humans to humankind because vaccines prevent diseases while drugs treat or control diseases. Without any research grant or government funding, in 1796 Edward Jenner developed an inoculum. It is said that when the British government asked him to lic...
October 01, 2009
So the law against homosexual sex has been read down. The Delhi High Court in a landmark judgement has struck down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) for adult consensual sex. Homosexual sex no longer comes under the purview of the law, except in cases of abuse or rape. Has this in any wa...
October 01, 2009
I started this article with a certain amount of indignation at Vinay Chandran's severe comments on mental health professionals in India and their negative attitude to homosexuality. Having had discussions about this issue with many of my colleagues and students, I know that "we" (at least in my c...
October 01, 2009
In 1993, the Society for Education, Action, and Research in Community Health (SEARCH) began conducting what it termed a "field trial of home-based neonatal care" in rural India. The centrepiece of this clinical, intervention-oriented study was the training of village women to evaluate babies arou...
October 01, 2009
India has the world's largest cataract backlog, with approximately 7 million individuals in need of cataract surgery . This is after the launch of the National Programme for the Control of Blindness, and of Vision 2020 - the right to sight programme - which lead to a considerable improvement in t...
July 01, 2009
This paper examines the "opt out" system of organ donation wherein the State permits removal of tissue and organs posthumously unless an express objection is made by the person prior to the death. This paper examines the need for "presumed consent" and the jurisprudential arguments in support of ...
July 01, 2009
In her article, Jyotika Kaushik addresses an important issue, that of the increasing shortage of kidneys available for transplantation worldwide. As a solution for India, Kaushik favours the introduction of the "presumed consent" system to allow retrieval of organs from recently deceased persons....
July 01, 2009
Organ transplantation is now a well established life saving procedure for patients suffering from end-stage disease of various organs. In the last four decades, the concept of "brain death", a state where the brain is irreversibly damaged but the heart is beating, has been legalised and accepted ...
July 01, 2009
Testing patients for infection with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), before surgery, as a prerequisite for surgery, a practice called "mandatory testing", is considered ethically unacceptable internationally. In India, the National Aids Control Organisation has advised against this practic...