Policy Wise

An interesting debate has broken out amongst drug companies, policy makers and patients on new cancer drugs which can extend life for a few months but are horribly expensive.
On Tuesday, the Food and Drug Administration approved GlaxoSmithKline’s Tykerb, a once-a-day pill for late-stage breast cancer patients that costs nearly $35,000 a year. It’s the [...]

According to this AP story, companies are being asked to donate unused patents to spur entrepreneurship. I had heard from a friend in IBM about large number of patents remaining unused, but the figure of 90-95% sounds startling. Of course, one must realize that all patents do not have the equal potential of developing into [...]

A story from China illustrates the primary problem anti-smoking campaigns face; health concerns vs. economic cost of banning smoking.
Proposals in China to ban smoking in public and raise tobacco taxes are pitting health professionals against a state-run industry that contributes more than $30 billion to the government.
The plans, which include a ban on tobacco advertising, [...]

A recently held global conference debated a vital question; Is it time to give up the dream of eradicating polio? By all measures, the polio eradication campaign, first launched in 1970’s, has been a huge success; the incident rate has dropped by more than 99% and less than 2000 new cases of polio were reported [...]

We have written before on the trans fats ban (here and here) but as it usually happens when such broad public health measures are taken, the fight becomes increasingly symbolic.
But, in a twist of science, the law and what some call trans-fat hysteria, Mr. Reich and other wholesale bakers are being forced to substitute processed [...]

Over at Nanopolitan, Abi raises the issue of the abysmally low budget allocation for government sponsored research and development in India. In response, Nitin points out that R&D should be left to private enterprise. Some interesting discussions in the comments section of both blogs (part of this write-up is essentially reposting a comment left on [...]

In the post on patents, we had briefly talked about partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and charitable organizations to develop low costs drugs for the developing world. One such attempt is already successful,
The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with [...]

According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) findings, only about 57% of Indian women have heard of HIV/AIDS.
India has 5.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS, according to the United Nations, which is the world’s highest caseload. But the prevalence rate, in the country of 1.1 billion people, is much lower than in most of [...]