-The Hindu In a society where self-worth is increasingly equated with sexual attractiveness, there are plenty of products that target both men and women. So why whine about the 18 Again ad? VAISHNA ROY I remember an old issue of MAD in which Dave Berg imagined a society where the nose defined sexuality. It had a hilarious sketch of a woman on a beach with a strip of cloth coyly covering her...

-The Economic Times Drug companies paid as little as 50,000 as compensation to families of volunteers who died during clinical trials for new medicines last year, leading to sharp criticism about the paltry sums being handed out and growing clamour among health groups for more stringent guidelines on new drug trials.  According to government data accessed by a healthcare activist through an RTI query, Germany's Fresenius Kabi paid 50,000 each to the...

-The Hindu An ideological conflict over the fundamentals of the revolutionary movement has led to a minor split in the Odisha unit of the CPI (Maoist), after the party think-tank expelled senor leader Sabyasachi Panda. Panda, who has now formed the Odisha Maowadi Party (OMP), has questioned the very path of protracted people’s war by the Maoists to achieve the new democratic revolution. In letters addressed to Maoist chief Ganapathy and other...

-The Telegraph A global effort to create a vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that has abandoned dozens of candidate vaccines because of unsatisfactory trials has persuaded India to join its new vaccine-design strategy. The Translational Health Sciences and Technology Institute, a government research centre in a Haryana suburb near Delhi, will set up a laboratory for basic research to seek out molecules that can generate antibodies to effectively neutralise HIV. India’s...

Tuberculosis re-emerges as a major threat as new drug-resistant strains develop because of mismanagement of the disease. At the beginning of the year, doctors at Mumbai’s P.D. Hinduja National Hospital and Medical Research Centre reported that they had 12 patients infected with TDR-TB, or totally drug-resistant tuberculosis, a condition in which the TB bacilli is resistant to all first- and second-line drugs used in the conventional treatment of the disease. Panic...