-First Post While Finance Minister P Chidambaram played the knight in the shining armour role to the hilt, going all out to woo the Indian woman – with an all-woman bank, the ‘Nirbhaya’ fund and an empathetic lecture on the girl child- after the shock value wears out, we are only left with measures which at best might only scrape the tip of the iceberg that is women’s development and security...

-The Times of India As many as 436 people died last year due to serious adverse events (SAE) during clinical trials. Investigations are now on to ascertain how many of the deaths were caused by drugs administered to the trial subjects. Union health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said on Friday that deaths could be due to life-threatening diseases such as cancer, heart failure and stroke or side-effects of the drugs or their...

-The Indian Express At a time when targeted therapies work like magic bullets killing cancer cells and sparing normal ones, only 15-20 per cent child victims of the disease are treated in India due to lack of diagnosis and access to treatment. With cancer affecting approximately 60,000 children in the country annually, the Lancet Oncology series released Tuesday is a wake-up call to the government to deal with the challenge of...

-The Hindu The United Nations has been drawing attention in recent years to the growing burden of non-communicable diseases, which have been adding to morbidity and premature deaths in most countries. In a declaration issued at a high-level meeting in 2011, the U.N. argued that low and middle income countries should actively pursue public health policies that will reduce the incidence of NCDs arising from diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, and a...

-Economic and Political Weekly The proposed legislation on the National Food Security Act has been steadily watered down since it was fi rst mooted in 2009. The Parliamentary Standing Committee that examined the 2011 Bill has disappointingly continued with "targeting". If the government passes the bill incorporating the committee's suggestions, a historic opportunity to combat hunger and malnutrition would be lost. Ankita Aggarwal (aggarwal.ankita87@gmail.com) is a Research Scholar at the Centre for...