India’s drug regulator has refused to disclose key information about a controversial government study that provided Indian girls a vaccine designed to protect them from cervical cancer, amplifying suspicions about the study’s objectives. The Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) has refused to release for public scrutiny the study’s protocols, which are expected to contain information about its purpose and methodology, a set of health activists said yesterday. The Union government had...

Rules out blanket ban on or approval of such studies ‘HPV vaccination should supplement cervical cancer screening programme' The three-member committee, set up to probe the alleged irregularities in conducting studies using human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine by PATH in India, has identified several deficiencies in the planning and implementation of the project leading “to a crisis requiring suspension of the study,” but has fallen short of fixing responsibility on any individual or...

NIIRA RADIA, the lobbyist at the heart of India’s audacious multi-billion telecom swindle, inaugurated a Krishna temple she funded in south Delhi on her birthday — that, interestingly, coincides with Indira Gandhi’s. Those present on the occasion said Radia prayed for long, presumably seeking divine intervention to wriggle out of the country’s biggest scandal. Before the temple visit, notices from the country’s Enforcement Directorate (ED), Income Tax (IT) Department and the...

Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Novartis have taken the top three spots again on the Access to Medicine Index, which ranks pharmaceutical companies on how readily they make their products available to the world's poor. It was the second time the rankings, which were created in 2008, have been issued. This time, 95 per cent of the brand-name companies approached by the Dutch foundation that started the index agreed to provide information;...