Poor Andhra villagers now victims of clinical drug trials No Drug Resistance     * 35 women, some men from Guntur district put throughclinical trials of a breast cancer drug. They later complain of joint pains, nausea and chest pains.     * Biotech industry in Andhra is worth about Rs 455 crore     * Touts operating on behalf of pharma companies get people from the poorer districts to Hyderabad for the tests *** Some 35 women...

Patients battling cancer, infections and mental illness joined a rally here today beseeching the government to reject a trade pact with the European Union that they fear will threaten the availability of inexpensive generic medicines in India. An estimated 2,000 people, many among them infected with HIV, walked along Delhi’s Parliament Street on a day when Indian and EU officials were negotiating a free trade agreement in Brussels. Health activists and lawyers...

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...

India has played a crucial role in making essential medicines available and affordable for patients in the developing world through generic drugs. This has been possible by linking India’s patent policies and laws to public interest. Similarly, policies that align public funded R&D in India with public health have the potential to provide incentives to the development of medical technologies (vaccines, diagnostics and medicines) crucial for treating neglected diseases like...

India has asked the World Health Organisation to explain media reports that the A (H1N1) influenza is a false pandemic. Making an intervention at the WHO Executive Board meeting, now on in Geneva, Union Health and Family Welfare Secretary K. Sujatha Rao said such reports were adversely impacting the public health measures being taken by countries. She called for greater transparency in the terms and conditions on which international manufacturers were...