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Category: Editorials
July 01, 2010
The reports of a racket in spurious and expired drugs operating in Tamil Nadu have thrown up several issues akin to the Indian Premier League. In the latter case, suddenly, after the one wrong tweet, skeletons tumbled out from nowhere and people who would have known about it, and who were probabl...
July 01, 2010
In early May 2010, a three-member bench of the Supreme Court of India, headed by the outgoing chief justice, delivered a pathbreaking judgment. It declared illegal, and a violation of human rights, the use of medical techniques such as narcoanalysis and various methods of “lie detection” (hereaft...
April 01, 2010
Gifts to doctors influence their prescribing patterns. Research has shown, quite unequivocally, that even a small gift, like a pen, can have an influence. The evidence on this is catalogued in detail on the website www.nofreelunch.org. The move of the Medical Council of India (MCI) to amend the c...
April 01, 2010
The recent decision of the Medical Council of India (MCI) to initiate the training of an exclusive cadre for the healthcare needs of rural areas has provoked intense debate. Groups as well as individual experts have raised several points while arguing on either side of the debate. This short comm...
January 01, 2010
Very few in the medical fraternity, if any, would have been surprised by the Delhi High Court panel finding that Apollo Indraprastha Hospital, New Delhi was not honouring its mandate to provide 33% of its beds free of charge to the poor and indigent. In 1986, the Delhi Administration invited prop...
January 01, 2010
In the last edition of this Journal Anant Phadke provided readers with the dreadful story of the death of Rida Sheikh from the H1N1 flu virus . Moving from this local and most concerning incident to the international arena reveals further matters worthy of consideration in the context of pandemic...
October 01, 2009
The tragic drama of Novel H1N1 flu epidemic in Pune; the controversy surrounding the first death; the overburdening of the city’s meagre public health system and the unnecessary, long queues in front of the Sarojini Naidu Hospital, the Pune Municipal Corporation’s infectious disease hospital, cal...
October 01, 2009
In an earlier editorial in this journal, Madhiwalla and Roy give a sombre account of the destruction of the Ponnampalam Memorial hospital in Puthukkudiyiruppu by the Sri Lankan air force in February 2009. Although they state in their editorial that the international medical community was silent d...
October 01, 2009
The most recent National Family Health Survey (NFHS 3, 2005-2006) was the first population-based survey in India to collect HIV prevalence data from a representative sample of women and men . As in other population-based surveys aimed at estimating national HIV prevalence, the NFHS conducted volu...
July 01, 2009
In many quarters there is satisfaction that India is developing into the "clinical trials capital" of the globe. By all accounts the business of conducting clinical trials in India is growing at a phenomenal rate. The reasons have been discussed widely and merit only a brief mention here. Situati...