-The Telegraph New Delhi: The sale of drug combinations containing last-resort antibiotics is rising faster than overall antibiotics sales in India, health researchers have said in a study that also highlights the government's failure to stop the sale of irrational and unapproved antibiotic cocktails. While total antibiotics sales in India rose 26 per cent over a four-year period, says the study, there was a 174 per cent increase in the sales of...
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Call to doctors to shun drug cocktails -GS Mudur
-The Telegraph New Delhi: A health consortium today questioned a decision by Delhi High Court earlier this week to quash the Centre's ban on 344 cocktails of two or more medicines and urged doctors across the country to stop prescribing them. The Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA), the Indian section of the global People's Health Movement, said it was shocked at the judgment because there was "no scientific rationale" for the continued use...
More »A disaster in the making -A Rangarajan
-Frontline Medecins Sans Frontieres warns that the free or regional trade agreements that are being negotiated, which seek to strengthen current patent regimes, are a potential threat to the developing world’s access to life-saving drugs, which it sources mostly from India. WHEN NELSON MANDELA’S GOVERNMENT passed the Medicines and Related Substances Control Act in 1997 to make medicines more accessible to the poor, 39 big pharmaceutical companies filed law suits in...
More »Patients looking for quick fixes, chemists & quacks spur antibiotics resistance -Roli Srivastava
-The Times of India PUNE: Family physician Dr Kumar Mandhare has been practising for 27 years in Koregaon Park in Pune, treating a wide variety of patients. Over the last few years, however, he has observed a new set of patients - on whom once-effective antibiotics drugs don't work. He pegs their number at 30 to 40% of the patients he gets, usually people who have found a quick fix solution to...
More »Virulent comeback -Lyla Bavadam
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...
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