There is a very thoughtful piece in Open Magazine on the problems of using herbal and ayurvedic medicines in the modern age. In many sectors, these medicines take the lion’s share of the market for treatment of many diseases in India — it is a Rs 8,000 crore a year market (over $1 billion). But […]
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USAid sees its future with entrepreneurs not government
There’s a fascinating NY Times blog interview today with USAid administrator, Rajiv Shah. The future of USAid involvement with India is, he thinks, nothing like the past. “We focus on using our India mission as a development innovation laboratory to try and find those partners in the private sector, scientists and entrepreneurs who are creating […]
TB, diagnostics and government
The Wall Street Journal has developed an obsession with TB in India. It is an important subject but enough to justify five big articles in the last year? The most recent (from yesterday) is again severely critical of the Government of India. The gist of the WSJ allegations is that Government is dragging its feet rather than […]
Is there real outrage over preventable deaths from infectious disease?
The current Tehelka carries a very simplistic piece on encephalitis deaths (for example, “immunoglobulin — a drug that cures encephalitis”) but it’s encouraging to see a spate of media pieces on deaths caused by infectious disease in India. There was a more thoughtful piece after last year’s monsoon season in the Wall Street Journal (reprinted in […]
Do foreigners have too much influence over India’s think tanks
This long piece from Open Magazinesuggests that foreign donors may have too much influence over India’s think tanks. Most of the article is not about health but it has this to say, “In the field of health policy, one of the most influential thinktanks is the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). Since it was […]
Pakistan, Bangladesh do better than India on key health parameters
Zee News and other outlets report a new global burden of disease study that shows India lagging well behind other Asian countries on key health parameters. Life expectancy at birth in India was 58.3 in 1990; it went up to 65.2 in 2010 but the comparable figures for Bangladesh were a jump from 58.9 to 69 years […]
Tackling the threats of pneumonia and diarrhoea
Two separate, yet related events spell good news for children under five in India. The first is the news that over five million children have been vaccinated in just over a year with the five-in-one pentavalent vaccine as part of routine immunisation in six states in India. Besides offering protection against diptheria, tetanus, whooping cough […]
Is India’s new approach to TB “complete nonsense”?
Today carried a Wall Street Journal article which rings many alarm bells on India’s new strategy for dealing with TB resistant to most antibiotics treatment. The WSJ has run a series of articles on this subject over the past year but this is a new claim: that India’s emergency strategy is now “encouraging TB to instead […]
Big questions about health turn political in India
It’s fashionable to moan about health never figuring on India’s political agenda. As we have suggested before in this blog, that may be changing. There is now a big, heavy duty argument involving philosophy, economics, ideology and all of the other components of a true political discussion. This article from Outlook is a well-written, if […]
Has India’s public health system collapsed?
In a hard-hitting op-ed this week in The Hindu, former Health Secretary Sujatha Rao bemoans “the absence of a well thought out policy framework for strengthening the health system.” She accuses her former political masters of “knee-jerk solutions and unintelligent tinkering” and the states of responsibility for ineffective insurance schemes: “new dimensions of fraudulent and […]