-Governance Now Magazine turns down red flag raised by a group of experts; says private food manufacturers part of campaign but "harmful" soft drink makers are not Days after a group of independent experts criticised the "commercial exploitation" of malnutrition and said the private sector should be kept out of any crusade against malnutrition, the Lancet, the renowned British medical journal, has advocated just the opposite, saying private players ought to...

-Reuters LONDON: Some 165 million children worldwide are stunted by malnutrition as babies and face a future of ill health, poor education, low earnings and poverty, the head of the United Nations children's fund said on Friday. Anthony Lake, executive director of Unicef, told Reuters the problem of malnutrition is vastly under-appreciated, largely because poor nutrition is often mistaken for a lack of food. In reality, he said, malnutrition and its irreversible health...

-The Hindu Over 1,00,000 children, below the age of 11 months, die of diarrhoea annually in India which is the second leading killer of young children globally, after pneumonia. India accounts for the highest number of diarrhoeal deaths, a latest study has suggested. A new international study published in the latest edition of the British medical journal The Lancetprovides the clearest picture yet of the impact and most common causes of diarrhoeal...

-The Hindu The Supreme Court judgment on Glivec is a blow for a patent regime with a higher threshold of inventiveness On April 1, 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the Intellectual Property Appellate Board's decision to deny patent protection to Novartis's application covering a beta crystalline form of imatinib -the medicine Novartis brands as Glivec, and which is very effective against the form of cancer known as chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). The...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Is India witnessing a spurt in unnecessary hysterectomies? Data released by international charity organization Oxfam on February 6 says as much. The agency said that unnecessary hysterectomies were being performed in Indian private hospitals to economically exploit poor women as well as government-run insurance schemes. A right to information (RTI) request filed by one of Oxfam's local NGOs in the Dausa district of Rajasthan showed that 258...