India's health industry was crippled back in 2008, when the then Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss decided to shut down three public sector vaccine units — to give contracts to a private firm. Two years back when the three public sector vaccine units were shut down, it led to a shortage of critical vaccines like BCG, DPT and Anti TB vaccines in India. CNN-IBN has accessed the probe report, which has found...
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India may move WTO as it seeks to resolve EU dispute by CH Unnikrishnan
India may seek the setting up of a special panel within the World Trade Organization to resolve the dispute with the European Union (EU) over the seizure of generic drug exports. The commerce ministry is ready to push for this at the WTO in the next week after months-long consultations with the concerned authorities, said a ministry official familiar with the development. Commerce secretary Rahul Khullar said both sides are still talking...
More »EU trips the poor
Even as India and the European Union (EU) inch closer to threshing out a free-trade agreement, the unresolved issue of seizures by EU member countries of Indian generic drugs on their way to other destinations continues to sour relations between the two. Over a score of such incidents of unlawful confiscation of Indian drug shipments by European customs authorities have occurred in the past three years. Ironically, most of such...
More »Drugs getting costlier, people cheaper by Harsimran Shergill
MONA SANGWAN, a teacher at a private school in Delhi, who earns just Rs. 4,000 a month and is her family’s sole earning member, had nearly begun to despair. How on earth was she going to raise Rs. 7,000 every month to buy the medicines her brother Ashwini, a kidney transplant patient, needed? Mona would have continued to despair had not the NGO Sarvohit Social Welfare Society stepped in. And to...
More »'Docs, clinicians on a par in villages' by Rema Nagarajan
It's official now. At the primary healthcare level, there is no difference in the performance of MBBS doctors with five-and-a-half years' training and non-physician clinicians with three years' training who have been called "legal quacks" by the Indian Medical Association (IMA). This has been demonstrated through a study conducted in Chhattisgarh that compared the performance of different types of clinical care providers at the primary care level. Following the controversy...
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