-The Times of India Indians are not only bad organ donors, but also averse to accepting brain death as the end of human life.  Doctors say most Indian families think their near and dear ones have a chance to recover till their hearts beat.  This slow acceptance of brain death — patients who have suffered complete and irreversible loss of all brain functions and are clinically and legally dead — is seriously affecting...

-Live Mint Natco Pharma Ltd, which has started selling a generic version of Bayer AG’s patented cancer treatment Nexavar in India at a fraction of the price charged by the German firm, plans to use the so-called compulsory licensing route to try and win the right to copy more patented drugs, said vice-chairman and chief executive officer Rajeev Nannapaneni. The Hyderabad-based company has already identified the patented drugs for which it will...

The proposed National Food Security Bill (NFSB), under consideration of Standing Committee of Parliament, may be reviewed for procurement and distribution of maize or corn (under coarse grains scheme) at Rs 1 per kg to intended beneficiaries. Without going into the merits and demerits of ever-increasing subsidies under NFSB, corn for human consumption is highly vulnerable to impermissible limits of fungal toxicity — called “aflatoxins (B1, B2, G1, G2)”. There are...

-The Hindu On May 5 this year, Tarun Sehrawat, a photographer with Tehelka, sent me a link to his most recent photo-essay on Abujmard, a Maoist-controlled area in Chhattisgarh. Tarun and I met on assignment in Dantewada in summer 2010 and had stayed in touch. A month-and-half later, last Friday, I attended his funeral after a fever he contracted in Abujmard proved fatal. Tarun died of cerebral malaria; he was 22. I came...

-The Economic Times It is not malaria or TB that will be the cause of large number of deaths in the world, Cancer is on its way to become one the deadliest diseases in the coming decades, according to a research paper published in medical journal Lancet. The study lead by Dr Freddy Bay of International Agency for Research on Cancer, France,predicts that the number of cancer patients in the world is...