-The Business Standard Drugs are unaffordable, but price control is the wrong answer There is little doubt that medicines in India are too expensive for most of the population. For the poorest 20 per cent of Indians, the expenditure on medicines alone is 85 per cent of what they spend on their health, according to the National Sample Survey. A World Bank study on the subject found that just out-of-pocket medical costs...

-Reuters BRUSSELS: Nine drugmakers, including Denmark's Lundbeck and India's Ranbaxy, were fined a total of 146 million euros by EU antitrust regulators on Wednesday for blocking the supply of a cheaper anti-depressant medicine to the market. The punishments follow a 2009 report by the European Commission on the pharmaceutical sector, which said "pay-for-delay" deals lead to consumers paying as much as 20 percent more for their medicines. The EU action came two days...

-Newsclick.in A few weeks back Fortune magazine and CNN carried a long online blog titled ‘Dirty Medicine' by Dinesh Thakur, a former employ of Ranbaxy, where he recounts how he came across several procedural and other lapses in the company's manufacturing facilities. Since then the Fortune blog has become one of the most widely circulated and commented upon business stories in the world. The story received attention as it came in the...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: The treatment of lakhs of tuberculosis (TB) patients, especially children, across the country has been jeopardized over the past few weeks as India battles a severe shortage of key TB Drugs. The stock-outs are more to do with two categories: paediatric and drug-resistant TB or DR-TB, industry experts say. Medical experts say that unless the government intervenes immediately, such acute shortage of Drugs could prove disastrous for...

-The Hindu New Delhi: Doctors of ayurveda and three other systems of medicine may be legally permitted to prescribe modern medicine under a controversial proposal from the Union health ministry that has angered sections of modern medics. The health ministry has asked state governments to take steps to allow state medical councils to enrol doctors with degrees in the traditional systems of medicine - ayurveda, unani, siddha, and homeopathy (AYUSH) - to...