When we hear the word innovation, we often think of new technologies or silver bullet solutions — like hydrogen fuel cells or a cure for cancer. To be sure, breakthroughs are vital: antibiotics and vaccines, for example, transformed global health. But as we’ve argued in Fixes, some of the greatest advances come from taking old ideas or technologies and making them accessible to millions of people who are underserved. One area...
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Govt explores capping FDI in pharma by CH Unnikrishnan
The Indian government is exploring a proposal to reduce the limit on foreign direct investment (FDI) allowed in the pharmaceutical industry through the automatic route to 49% from 100% amid concerns over the takeover of local drug makers by overseas firms. Officials from the ministry of commerce and industry and the ministry of health have had multiple rounds of discussions on the proposal following a note written to them by the finance...
More »A Deadly Misdiagnosis by Michael Specter
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...
More »Vaccine crisis: Govt shut down 3 units in 2008 by Seemi Pasha
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...
More »Vaccine probe exposes flawed appreciation by S Viswanathan
The report of the Javid Chowdhury Committee facilitated the resumption, in February 2010, of vaccine production in the three public sector units, one in Himachal Pradesh and the other two in Tamil Nadu. Javid Chowdhury, a former Health Secretary of the Government of India, recommended that the suspension of their licenses for manufacturing vaccines in 2008 should be revoked in the public interest and on the strength of the compliance...
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