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Category: COMMENTS
April 06, 2018
The outbreak of Zika virus infection in the Americas and its possible association with microcephaly raised several concerns among global health authorities regarding the organisation of the Olympic and Paralympic Games scheduled for August and September 2016, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil...
March 28, 2018
It is five years since the fatal gang rape of Jyothi Singh (Nirbhaya), a physiotherapy student, on December 16, 2012, in New Delhi, the capital of India. The legal and policy reforms triggered by the Nirbhaya case will remain a watershed moment in the history of efforts towards seeking justice...
March 23, 2018
The evaluation of performance in scientific research at any level – whether at the individual, institutional, research council or country level – is not easy. Traditionally, research evaluation at the individual and institutional levels has depended largely on peer opinion, but with the rapid gro...
March 15, 2018
Corruption in healthcare generally and specifically in the pharmaceutical arena has recently been highlighted in reports by Transparency International. This article focuses on four areas of corruption: legislative/regulatory, financial, ideological/ethical, and communications. The problems identi...
January 01, 2018
Although over 15 years in the making, the HIV legislation has recently been passed in India. This Act is unique in many respects, and hopefully a precursor to broader health sector legislation. The process of law making in this instance included a robust consultative process with civil society an...
December 12, 2017
The aim was to compare the ethics of historical Indian and New Zealand prospective studies of cervical pre-cancer in terms of: scientific justification, potential harms and benefits to subjects, informed consent procedures, monitoring and stopping, and exploitation.
The New Zealand study had p...
December 07, 2017
An experiment dating from the 1960s in New Zealand has eerie similarities to research begun in 1976 in India. In both cases, women with evidence of early cervical cancer or pre-cancer went untreated, despite known treatments that could have prevented their condition from worsening. This Comment o...
November 30, 2017
This piece critically reflects on the growing Indian desire for fairer shades of skin. While skin-whitening products vanish off store shelves, notwithstanding protests against such products, the event that generated a storm some time ago in the media was the Garbha Sanskar workshops. In these wor...
November 23, 2017
The current system of blood banks in India is such that rural patients are deprived of timely access to an adequate volume of life-saving blood, adding to preventable mortality. On the basis of an academic framework for a blood transfusion system, we describe an alternative approach in which rura...
November 14, 2017
This paper expands on some of the points made by Deepak Natarajan on techniques used in designing clinical trials of new drugs to ensure favourable outcomes. It also considers the nexus between the manufacturers of new drugs and the publishers of medical journals in which edited versions of these...