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Category: Research Articles
April 01, 2003
The unravelling of the entire genetic sequence of humans and, more recently, of important pathogens such as the causative agents of tuberculosis and malaria are landmark events in science. This is just a beginning in improving our understanding of biology and disease. The tools and techniques for...
April 01, 2003
Enlargement of people's choices is one form of human development. To this extent, biotechnology as a treatment option for certain human ailments such as genetic disorders can be taken as an effort towards human development, as it definitely extends the range of choices available to the public. Th...
April 01, 2003
White coats spell authority. So no identification was asked of the man and woman thus clothed who walked into the maternity ward of the state-government-run JJ Hospital in Mumbai on January 16, 2003. On one bed lay the 4-day infant born to 21-year-old Vidya Chavan. Ms Chavan had gone to the bathr...
July 01, 2002
The reports of deaths of children in Assam following massive doses of Vitamin A administration during a mass campaign in November 2001, and a similar episode in neonates in Tamil Nadu some months earlier, have provoked extended controversy. Clearly, there is an urgent need to formulate guidelines...
April 01, 2002
Health care inflation two to three times higher than the general inflation rate is not a phenomenon confined to the United States: all western countries face the same. In western European countries with growth of the welfare state in the inter-war years, universal health coverage was enacte...
April 01, 2002
Issues in Medical Ethics is in now in its tenth year of publication. It has been years of voluntary effort and the commitment of a few, on a shoestring budget, that have seen the journal through. Bringing out each issue has been demanding. The editorial board is still voluntary and there is no fu...
January 01, 2002
Recent advances in science and technology have brought with them many questions. One of these, affecting the state of medicine, is the advent of gene patenting. Patents are a part of a larger subset called 'Intellectual Property (IP)' which grant monopoly to those with new ideas or knowledge. Leg...
January 01, 2002
The economic prosperity following the Second World War led to a dramatic growth in the American health-care industry. By the 1970s, Americans outspent everyone else on health care. Yet, most public health indicators showed that US lagged behind most industrialised countries and up to one in five ...
October 01, 2001
At the turn of the twentieth century, health care in the United States, as in the rest of the world, was a commodity: you could buy it and enjoy it if you could pay for it. The poor went hungry or received some care at municipal, governmental or charity soup kitchens. In the 1920s, liberal reform...
July 01, 2001
Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has changed the profile of the HIV epidemic in the developed world. Many of these countries have reported a dramatic decline in AIDS-related morbidity and mortality after the introduction of HAART into routine clinical practice. For the first time sinc...