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November 06, 2019
Twin girls were born in China in November 2018 to an HIV-positive father and an HIV-negative mother, through in vitro fertilisation in combination with CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing which altered their CCR5 genes. An investigation found that regulations were broken, and documents were forged. The go...
June 18, 2019
The Indian Medical Association has expressed doubts about whether casteism exists in the medical profession. I would like to report what I witnessed as a medical student at the Government Medical College (GMC), Nagpur, where I studied from 1982 to 1987. There was much to be proud of in this colle...
November 06, 2019
The applications of gene editing technologies such as CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) have grown significantly in recent years. Several countries have adopted different stances on the regulation of such technology; however, India does not have any legally enforc...
April 08, 2019
The Global gag rule (GGR), originally known as the Mexico City Policy, is a United States policy that limits the reproductive rights of women in many resource-poor countries. In 2018, the US administration of President Donald Trump reinstated this policy, which was first issued by President Ronal...
March 28, 2019
The Government of India has passed a notification making the non-reporting of tuberculosis (TB) by a clinical establishment a punishable offence. This article examines this move from an ethical standpoint. One of the main ethical concerns relates to the violation of patient confidentiality that m...
March 26, 2019
This paper primarily discusses the judgment of the Delhi High Court on the government’s ban on the use of Oxytocin. Part 1 recapitulates the events leading up to the ban and Part 2 discusses the legal issues considered by the Court before pronouncing its judgment. The paper outlines how life and...
March 21, 2019
From 1939 to 1945, John Black Grant a Rockefeller Foundation officer and former Professor of Public Health at the Peking Union Medical College served as the Director of the All Institute of Hygiene and Public Health, Calcutta. Grant's India tenure is important for his efforts to ameliorate the co...
December 12, 2018
The principle of nonmaleficence requires that every medical action be weighed against all benefits, risks, and consequences, occasionally deeming no treatment to be the best treatment. In medical education, it also applies to performing tasks appropriate to an individual's level of competence ...
November 26, 2018
The Supreme Court of India recently decriminalised homosexuality by passing a landmark judgment in the case of Navtej Johar and Others v. Union of India. In its judgment, the Court held that Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 is unconstitutional in as much as it criminalises consensual se...
October 29, 2018
An increasingly blurred understanding of the conditions under which clinicians may withhold HIV seropositive status from partners of patients who are sexually active and who do not intend to disclose suggests a critical need to revisit the relationship between the principle of confidentiality, th...