Policy Wise

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Recently, Libiya had released Belgian doctors accused of deliberately infecting Libyan children with HIV. While the rest of the world has largely been skeptical of Libyan claims, largely due to its political leadership, Harriet A Washington points out why [...]

In a significant judgment, the Chennai High Court has rejected Novartis’s attempt to patent Gleevec in India. The court judgment is being hailed by assorted NGO’s and Indian pharmaceutical companies which make generic drugs. As Bibek Debroy points out, they are missing the whole point.
Third, let’s not confuse broader public health issues with the [...]

Searching For A New Balance

Public health is concerned with the health of the community as a whole. Its key goal is to reduce a population’s exposure to disease. It has been said that: “Health care is vital to all of us some of the time, but public health is vital to all of us all [...]

A a very interesting new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine claims that obesity is ”contagious” and can spread across contacts,
involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003. The investigators knew who was friends with whom, [...]

Government’s decision to monitor pregnancies is a regressive step.

In a bid to check female infanticide and the worsening sex ratio, the Indian government has decided to make registration mandatory for all pregnancies. Further, abortions would now be allowed under certain circumstances.
On Thursday, Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhury told Hindustan Times that she [...]

American drug prices remain the highest in the world. Comparisons are often made with drugs prices elsewhere–in both the developed world and the developing world. Online pharmacies which can supply drugs at a huge discount to American prices remains a big political and ethical issue.
Mark Keliman, Professor of Public Policy at UCLA makes an important [...]

In American science and medicine, the concept of informed consent owes much to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which more than 300 American blacks were treated as guinea pigs to study the long term of effects of untreated syphilis. Despite the fact that Penicillin was discovered in the 1940’s–the experiment–started in the 1932, continued [...]

Drug companies are funding nearly two-third of CME sessions which doctors must attend in order to keep their license, and this raises some serious conflict of interest claims.
Overall, commercial sponsors pick up about half of the $2.25 billion annual cost of the courses doctors must attend to keep their licenses.
“Most of what doctors know about [...]

Michael Moore’s new documentary on the American Health system has opened to rave reviews–especially from the usual anti-establishment crowd. Professor Saul Levmore of the University of Chicago has one of the few balanced reviews,

So let me ask some questions. Moore tries to show that many Canadians and French are happy with their systems and do [...]

In recent years, smoking bans in public spaces have become hugely popular. Airlines industries, universities, government and private offices to now even bars and clubs–smokers have been virtually banished from the public space. There have even been demands for banning smoking in private homes! Even France and Germany, where smoking remains popular and socially acceptable, [...]