The department of personnel in Rajasthan, a state in India, has taken a bold step by making it mandatory for candidates who want a government job to commit to not smoking or chewing gutka (smokeless tobacco product) when in government service. [1] What could be the reason for such a move? Do such rulings help […]
Category: South Asia
Richard Lehman’s journal review—28 January 2014
NEJM 23 Jan 2014 Vol 370 301 It’s hard to think of two places less alike than the icy expanses of Alaska and the hot claustrophobic depths of a South African gold mine. But back in the 1960s, people who huddled for warmth in Alaska often spread tuberculosis among themselves, and a randomised trial showed […]
Pranab Chatterjee: Discussing ethics in HIV/AIDS research in India
On 23 and 24 December 2013, the Department of AIDS Control (DAC), India, in collaboration with the CDC and FHI360 organised a capacity building workshop on ethics in HIV/AIDS research with a special focus on the Indian context. The event was attended by a broad spectrum of stakeholders in HIV/AIDS research in India. With such […]
Simon Chapman: When will the tobacco industry apologise for its galactic harms?
Last week, four US tobacco companies finally reached agreement with the US Department of Justice to fund large scale corrective advertising about five areas of tobacco control. Each advertisement will include the statement that the companies “deliberately deceived the American public.” The case against the companies commenced in 1999 and saw a 2006 judgment by […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—20 January 2014
NEJM 16 Jan 2014 Vol 370 201 Developing and marketing a new drug is a tricky business, but it can be a very lucrative one. AiCuris is a company I hadn’t heard of before, but it seems to specialize in antiviral drugs. For such a company, herpes simplex 2 infection presents a huge market opportunity: […]
Anita Jain: Ensuring no woman dies during childbirth in India
In conversation with my grandmother recently, I travelled nearly 60 years back in time to a village in Rajasthan as she recounted her near death experience during childbirth. Though lately prone to forgetting minor details, she surprised me with a vivid description of the events as they unfurled when she experienced excessive bleeding around the […]
Richard Smith: NCD among the bottom billion
My main job these days means thinking about non-communicable disease (NCD) in low and middle income countries (LMIC), but a paper in the Lancet suggests that I may be thinking in the wrong way. It’s always hard to shift your mental model dramatically, but perhaps I need to do so. I and the 11 centres […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—13 January 2014
JAMA Internal Medicine Jan 2014 Vol 174 I was amazed at the richness of the contents of JAMA Intern Med this week, but then I sadly realized that the journal has changed from being a fortnightly treat to being a monthly one. I had been warned this would happen; it’s a natural consequence of online […]
Anita Jain: Predatory publishing and open access fees
At the meeting of the Indian Association of Medical Journal Editors [IAMJE] in Delhi recently, a session on predatory or non-legitimate journals stimulated considerable discussion. A sting operation where 157 open access journals accepted a spoof research paper with obvious flaws for publication has brought the problem to the fore again. Some allege that the […]
Richard Lehman’s journal review—6 January 2014
NEJM 26 Dec 2013 Vol 369 2481 There was no let up in the American journals over what they call the holiday period, and the NEJM offered a trial of a new GSK influenza vaccine to our attention on Boxing Day. It is a quadrivalent vaccine containing inactivated influenza B virus of both main lineages, […]