Nearly 138 million Indian smokers do not know that smoking tobacco causes stroke. As many as 92 million on the other hand aren't aware that tobacco causes heart disease. According to a report released on Friday by the World Heart Federation, half of all Chinese smokers and one-third of Indian and Vietnamese smokers are unaware of the risks tobacco poses to our heart. Awareness of the risk of second-hand smoke is even lower. Around...

The implementation of Patents Act, as last amended in 2005, raises significant issues of immediate concern to patients across the world. INDIA'S Patents Act has an interesting history. Enacted first in 1911 as the Indian Patents and Designs Act in the colonial era, it primarily addressed the interests of inventors, who did not want their inventions infringed upon by anyone who copied them or adopted the methods used to make them....

India is coming under increasing pressure from the U.S. and the European Union for the strict patentability criteria it applies for medicines. AS was only to be expected, the two landmark decisions made by the Indian patent office in recent times concerning pharmaceutical patent cases have not gone down well with the multinational drug industry. First, there was the rejection in 2006 of the patent application by the Swiss multinational...

NOVARTIS has long been suing the Government of India to eliminate or weaken Section 3(d) of the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2005, which established strict standards of patentability in order to prevent the ever-greening of patent monopolies on medicines. Although Novartis lost in 2007 its initial efforts to have Section 3(d) declared unconstitutional and violative of international norms for national patent regimes, it has persisted in appealing and re-appealing the denial...

-Mid-Day.com Politicians are not known to be fans of the Right to Information Act, but now they seem to have discovered that they can use the same law to obtain details on RTI activists' work, allegedly in order to know which activist they need to harass to prevent the next big expose. RTI activists claim that political leaders are making their proxies use the sunshine law to know what information the activists...