-The Telegraph The Supreme Court today refrained from passing any order on a plea for early listing of a PIL that had sought closure of pharmaceutical giant Ranbaxy, recently penalised by US authorities for allegedly supplying adulterated and substandard drugs. The public interest petition sought registration of criminal cases under the penal code and also the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1947, against company officials for allegedly cheating millions of patients in the...

-The Telegraph The medical fraternity is worried over the seizure of sub-standard and fake drugs, at times lethal for patients. Police on Wednesday seized 30 boxes of suspected spurious drugs from a cart in the Gandhi Maidan area. Station House Officer of Gandhi Maidan police station Rajbindu Prasad said nobody could produce transaction bills for the consignment. The drugs seized were ofloxacin (for respiratory tract infections), oflozen (for typhoid), ossopan (calcium tablets prescribed...

-The Economic Times The Union Cabinet has okayed a new price-control formula for pharmaceuticals, which seeks to cap prices at the arithmetic average of all drugs with more than 1% market share in any therapeutic segment that is to be brought under price control. Given that the existing system of fixing prices of select drugs is on the basis of costs, which is rigid, intrusive and prone to manipulation as well,...

The pill that you pop when down with fever or the syrup you gulp for relief from cough are not cure for sure. They can be counterfeit drugs made in some substandard medicine-manufacturing centres as the one sealed in the city today. Operating from a two-storeyed building in the Rajiv Nagar area, the sealed unit was allegedly involved in making counterfeit drugs. The batch numbers of several medicines seized from the...

Drug prices have shot up phenomenally in India over the past decade and a half. A Planning Commission's expert group says there was nearly 40% rise in all drug prices between 1996 and 2006, thanks to the nation's pricedecontrol policies of the 1990s. Citing a study conducted in 2008, the Commission's high-level expert group (HLEG) on universal health coverage, headed by Dr K Srinath Reddy, says during the same period...