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Today’s Hindustan Times reports that Aamir Khan today appeared before a parliamentary committee and argued for restrictions on foreign direct investment in Indian pharmaceutical companies.  He submitted a confidential report to the committee on the matter. The cause of limiting big pharma’s activities in India is close to the heart of Commerce Minister, Anand Sharma […]

Readers might remember a posting a few weeks ago on the likelihood of Osama Bin Laden’s legacy living on in an increased number of polio cases in South Asia. The US used a fake immunisation drive as a cover for collecting the DNA of Bin Laden’s family. The doctor involved was convicted of spying in

The WHO this week declared drug-resistant gonorrhoea to be a global emergency (this link is to a good report in Wired magazine). The main Indian dailies covered the story but no-one splashed on it because India was not one of the countries mentioned in the list of places where resistant gonorrhoea has been discovered. Given what

As per the proposal, a medical student, after completing almost 5 years study and the hospital internship after that, will have to undergo a mandatory year-long house job in the form of a rural posting before getting the MBBS degree. Till then, the degree would be provisional. Could this move fill the gap in the

This New York Times column (by Dawn columnist Huma Yusuf) sugests that the fake vaccination programme used by the Americans to collect DNA from the Bin Laden family, may make polio eradication even more difficult in Pakistan. Will that effect spread across the border to rural Muslim communities in India? There have long been rumours

Following from my last post on Bill Gates’ meeting in India, here’s a a short and interesting interview with the well known Indian journalist-Vikram Chandra.  He talks about the positive competition among UP and Bihar to improve health indicators; also, he provides a short insight into his Foundation’s thinking on sanitation. Here’s the link.

Bill Gates is in India and doing the rounds of the ‘who’s who’.  Over the years he has shown great interest in reaching out to young, ‘gen-next’ politicians.  He had written a glowing tribute to Rahul Gandhi  as well as Nitish Kumar in his Annual Letter a couple of years ago.  This short article from

India is part of another global phenomenon: otherwise-rational healthcare professionals remain unvaccinated despite several H1N1 outbreaks in India over the past three years. This Times of India story asks some of them why and quotes Dr Elango (the very respected former Director of Public Health in Tamil Nadu) as saying that unprotected hospital workers could “prove

Aamir Khan, India’s top hindi film star explores some critical issues on the provision of healthcare in India and unscrupulous medical practitioners.  A bit sensational but fantastic to see meaningful discussions on such issues in the mainstream cultural space in India.  Here’s a link to the full episode (unfortunately only in Hindi).

Tamil Nadu is taking determined efforts against non-communicable diseases acorrrding to  Mr Jerard Selvam, Deputy Director, Tamil Nadu Health Systems Project (NRHM – Government of Tamil Nadu).  Over twenty percent of deaths in TN are from cardovascular disease and the state is determined to act to reduce the toll, he told a recent meeting of the