-The Indian Express Indian healthcare providers need to get serious about infection control. A deadly strain of bacterium has doubled its resistance to last-resort antibiotics within a year, according to the report “State of the World’s Antibiotics, 2015”. By an estimate, antimicrobial resistance — the ability of bugs to outwit antibiotics — will claim two million lives in India by 2050, a fifth of the total. India is under pressure to curb...

-The Hindu Industry seeks control on yarn prices, permission to export cloth Nearly three-fourths of the 9 lakh powerloom units in Maharashtra’s Bhiwandi have been on strike since Monday, leaving as many workers jobless and per-day losses of about Rs 150 crore, estimate textile industry associations. The strike has brought half of India’s powerloom sector to a halt, they say, since it comes over and above the production cutbacks in place since...

Due to the annual decline in under-5 mortality rate by almost 7% during 2008-13, the Government is hopeful of India attaining the target 5 of Millennium Development Goal-4 i.e. reduce by two-thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the U5MR. This has been revealed in a press release on checking child mortality rate by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, dated 28 April, 2015.   However, experts think that this will be...

-The Times of India It has become fashionable to announce the setting up of new AIIMS or AIIMS-like institutes in every annual union budget. After the first six were announced in 2006, finance minister Arun Jaitley announced the setting up of four more in the last budget and another six in the current one, taking the total number to 16, not counting the original one in Delhi. While announcing new AIIMS...

-Economic and Political Weekly The key to improving the quality of healthcare services in India and reducing costs at the same time can be found by enacting legislation which lays down minimum standards of patient care. In the absence of such standards and the reluctance of health insurance companies to standardise either price or quality, healthcare services continue to be expensive and of doubtful quality. Developing standards of patient care by...