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Category: Letters
April 21, 2024
As the world grapples with the constant threat of new pathogens, the role of government oversight in research and response efforts has become a topic of considerable debate in the academic community. In the recently released “SOP [standard operating procedure] for Nipah virus research in Kerala f...
April 21, 2024
Saviour babies or saviour siblings are conceived specifically to be sources of biological materials — ranging from cord blood, stem cells or even organs — to save another child, usually an older sibling, who is suffering from a disease like thalassemia that can be cured with this biological mater...
October 09, 2023
Recently, the data quality of the National Sample Surveys (NSS) and the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) has become the centre of discussion [1,2]. Two issues that have been raised include the overestimation of the rural population in these surveys and greater response rates in poorer wealth...
October 09, 2023
In the twenty-first century, there is still a taboo on frank discussion of menstruation in Indian society, particularly with men. This inadvertently widens the gender/equity gap in families and in society. Even men in the healthcare sector are uncomfortable talking about this because the societal...
October 09, 2023
Numerous challenges have crippled the Afghan healthcare system. The nearly half-a-century-long war — that continues to this day — has had profound effects on all aspects of Afghans' lives, medical education being no exception. However, Afghans have partially revived their healthcare and medical e...
April 30, 2023
Jinee Lokneeta’s editorial on Police investigation and unethical “scientific interrogation” was published in the January-March 2023 issue of IJME [1]. It is a scathing critique of the way police investigators rampantly misuse/exploit loopholes in the law, extract forced confessions from the accus...
July 02, 2023
I read the editorial “Ethics regulation by National Medical Commission: No reason for hope” by Amar Jesani with keen interest [1]. The article raises many pertinent issues which need urgent policy attention. Institutions and governance for regulating medical education and practice in India carry ...
July 02, 2023
The provision of government-funded public health services in India is grossly inadequate and 48.2% of “total health expenditure” for India is paid “out of pocket” [1]. When the total health expenditure in a household exceeds 10% of the annual income, it is considered catastrophic health expenditu...
January 10, 2023
The combined discipline of Yoga & Naturopathy (Y&N) constitutes one of the official indigenous medical systems under the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa, and Homoeopathy (AYUSH), Government of India (GoI). The GoI has recently regulated all the systems under AY...
January 10, 2023
The duration of the pandemic over the last two years has witnessed the steering of multiple technological interventions by governments. These interventions — ranging from contact tracing applications to vaccine certificates — have been developed in the specific context of the pandemic, and were m...