-The Times of India LUCKNOW: Seeing their child in tears each time an insulin pen pricks the belly isn't the only pain parents of a type-1 diabetic child have to go through. The cost associated with management of the disease hurts equally, if not more. A middle-income family spends an estimated 18% of family income on the disease. The findings are from a study conducted by the department of endocrinology at Sanjay...

-The Indian Express At simultaneous zeniths of their cycles this monsoon, chikungunya appears mild but causes a scare by spreading beyond the south. This year’s robust monsoon has come at a price: a zenith in the dengue and chikungunya cycles. Spiralling cases of both diseases have sent alarm bells ringing and the “season” has only just begun. Chikungunya, which has never really been a big worry in the north, has struck Delhi strongly...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: More than 400 cases of chikungunya were recorded in Delhi in the past week, health officials said on Monday, as the mosquito-borne disease that causes debilitating joint pain threatened to replace dengue as the Capital’s most widespread monsoon ailment. Officials said 412 new cases of chikungunya were reported last week, taking the total this year to 432. The same period saw 176 new dengue cases, taking the number...

-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...

-The Hindu We need to rethink social safety nets in India’s growing economy so that they can also focus on the accidents of life rather than solely on the accidents of birth. Sometimes the grand narratives of the Left and the Right do not seem to have any relationship with the lived experiences of ordinary Indians. For the past two decades, the Left has tried to expand social welfare programmes for the...