The debate about essential-medicine pricing and access in India illustrates the difficulties inherent in establishing policies that serve conflicting public interests in achieving goals such as caring well and ensuring safety for all, while also pursuing financially-sustainable success in scientific innovation and trade. It highlights problems facing those interested in continuing drug and vaccines development and ensuring that, once marketed, such products contribute effectively to improving public health. Modern pharmaceuticals...

-The Times of India The Centre on Thursday responded to the Supreme Court's concern over spiralling prices of essential medicines and promised to make all-out efforts to put under strict price control regime all the 348 drugs included in the National List of Essential Medicines (NLEM), 2011. A bench comprising Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya had, in the last hearing, expressed concern over the shrinking list of medicines under...

Accused No 1 Noor-ul-Huda, 26 Labourer, Arrested on October 22, 2006 A month after the Malegaon blasts in September 2006, two policemen walked up to the house of Noor-ul-Huda at Jaffer Nagar on a Ramzan evening. They took Noor with them, telling his father they would send him back in 10 minutes. “Five years have passed. How long is their 10 minutes?” asks Noor’s father Shumshuz Zoha. This wasn’t the first time Noor...

The discussion paper on compulsory licensing of patents will have achieved its purpose if it can lead to a proactive policy in the area of drugs and health. IN a proactive move to ensure a fair balance between protection of intellectual property rights and protection of the public interest, the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry has chosen to put out a discussion...

India has asked the World Health Organisation to explain media reports that the A (H1N1) influenza is a false pandemic. Making an intervention at the WHO Executive Board meeting, now on in Geneva, Union Health and Family Welfare Secretary K. Sujatha Rao said such reports were adversely impacting the public health measures being taken by countries. She called for greater transparency in the terms and conditions on which international manufacturers were...