-The Hindu In 2014, an Indian pharmaceutical company was globally the first to receive approval to market a biosimilar, thereby affordable version, of the breast cancer drug Trastuzumab. Almost immediately, Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche, innovator of the drug, filed a suit against the Indian Food & Drug Administration (FDA) to block its sale. The action firmly put their profits ahead of the lives of women with breast cancer. Roche effectively embroiled India’s...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India's government-funded health insurance schemes have increased patients' access to hospitalisation but failed to reduce their households' personal out-of-pocket healthcare expenses, the most comprehensive review of the schemes so far has found. The review by public health analysts has found increases ranging from 12 per cent to 244 per cent in hospital-based services across the country since the schemes were launched a decade ago. But there is no...

-Hindustan Times India’s generic drug manufacturers have flooded the market with cheaper medicines to treat hepatitis C after Gilead Sciences Inc’s patent application was rejected in January 2015. Thanks to domestic drugmakers, the world is looking to India to reduce the price of hepatitis C drug further. “By scaling up the production of generic medicines, India is playing a pivotal role globally in reducing the prices of medicines for hepatitis C,” said Henk...

-The Hindu MSF Secretary General Jerome Oberreit on the increasing threat to affordable health care worldwide. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors without Borders, the international humanitarian medical aid organisation that is active in 69 countries, serves populations affected by epidemics, armed conflicts, natural calamities and manmade disasters. MSF has relied heavily on generic drugs, much of which has been sourced from India, to deliver health care to some of the most...

-The Hindu Health-care workers at the primary level must be given the knowledge and skills to provide NCD and associated risk factor care. Noncommunicable diseases (NCD) such as diabetes, respiratory diseases, cancer and heart diseases are taking a severe toll on public health across the WHO South-East Asia Region. Approximately 8.5 million lives, many of them premature, are lost each year due to NCDs, making them the region’s leading cause of death...