ABSTRACT
Donald W Light, Antonio F Maturo. Good pharma: the public-health model of the Mario Negri Institute New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 288 pp. Hardback $ 95, ISBN 9781137388339. The world of innovation remains divorced from the world of clinical practice and the two intersect only when clinical practice, primed by the pharmaceutical industry’s publicity machinery, uncritically laps up all that “big pharma” has to offer. Seldom is clinical research guided by clinical practice and its requirements. New medicines target illusory surrogate end points that might have little to add in terms of actual therapeutic value.
ABSTRACT
Ajay Khare was not a hero. He was just an ordinary person like most of us, with extraordinary qualities. That is how I will remember him.
ABSTRACT
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare recently unveiled a draft “National Health Policy (NHP)”, which was available for public comments till March 10, 2015. Arguably the exercise of crafting a national policy on health is an important and necessary step towards universalising access to healthcare. However, past experience would make us somewhat cynical while analysing the process and its outcome. The 2015 policy is to replace the 2002 Health Policy, which, in turn, was preceded by the first NHP of independent India, declared in 1983. The fact that it took successive governments 36 years following Independence to develop a national policy on health, in itself speaks of their degree of seriousness, as does the fact that the policy has been revised only once in the intervening 32 years.
ABSTRACT
We see today a shift in the terrain of trade agreements from the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the binding trade rules that it imposes on member countries, to bilateral and regional trade agreements. From 1990 to 2007, the number of such agreements notified to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) or the WTO increased from 20 to 159. At present, it is estimated that over 250 regional and bilateral trade agreements govern more than 30% of world trade
ABSTRACT
The almost universal application of policies that promote integration of the globe through trade in goods and services and liberalised flow of finances – loosely termed “globalisation” – has also necessitated development of fairly elaborate global structures of governance. In the health sector this manifests itself as global health governance, i.e. global structures that attempt to govern issues related to health that transcend national boundaries.