-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday forced the Centre to stop clinical trials of 162 new drugs or chemical entities which had been cleared by the expert committee for testing on human beings in India. A bench of Justices R M Lodha and Shiva Kirti Singh was about to pass an order restraining the Centre from going ahead with these clinical trials when additional solicitor general Sidharth...

-The Economic Times The government must explain to the Supreme Court, with scientific evidence, why the pentavalent vaccine, now introduced into the immunisation programme, should not be banned. The vaccine is designed to combat five childhood diseases: diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, Hepatitis B, pneumonia and meningitis. So far, more than 82,000 doses have been administered and there have been 29 cases of adverse effects after immunisation. After examining the evidence, it is unclear...

-Live Mint ‘Give me any job... but please take me out of this hell', says 57-year-old Saraswati, a manual scavenger New Delhi: Saraswati doesn't remember the last time her bare hands touched the statues of the gods lying on a shaky wooden plank in a corner of her one-room house in Farrukhnagar village of Ghaziabad district. She doesn't remember the last time she prayed or fasted. She says every part of her body...

-The Indian Express Pune: Rajendra Kumar, Rajkot's district collector, has had a first-hand experience of the disease his office is tracking. "On the very first day of fever, I had my blood tested to rule out dengue," he says. "I was extremely weak and had to be hospitalised in the first week of September." The district has seen 280 cases of dengue so far this season. In Pune, National Institute of Virology deputy director Dr...

-The Hindustan Times About 1.98 lakh farmers committed suicide in India between 2001 and 2012 as the benefits of high growth failed to trickle down to the rural areas, says the India Rural Development Report 2012-13 released on Thursday. Indebtedness and lenders confiscating land have been attributed as the main causes of the farmers' deaths. Around two-third of the farmer suicides were reported from Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. Depicting the...