Vienna—Efforts to rid the world of dangerous medicines have been given a boost by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. Delegates of UN member states, police, manufacturers, academics, and pressure groups gathered recently at UNODC headquarters in Vienna to discuss the present and future criminalisation of “fraudulent” medicines, which increasingly threaten the international […]
Category: South Asia
Anita Jain: A roundtable on primary healthcare in India
Coinciding with the visit of the British prime minister, David Cameron, to India last week, a business seminar was held in Mumbai to identify opportunities for health sector partnerships. Meeta Lochan, secretary of the public health department of Maharashtra, offered insights on the intricacies of healthcare provisioning in Maharashtra. For instance, over the years the […]
Krishnan Ganapathy: Homo mobilicus – the homo sapiens of tomorrow
When Marty Cooper (whom I had the privilege of meeting) invented the cell phone in 1973, he could not have foreseen that he would be disproving Charles Darwin’s hypothesis. According to Darwin, from the days of the Big Bang it has taken tens of thousands of years, for a new species to evolve. Marty reduced […]
Krishnan Ganapathy: Is surgery not more than stitching and cutting ?
The genesis for this blog was listening to 34 fascinating, highly technical lectures including “How I do it” sessions at an international neurosurgical update for young neurosurgeons. Operating theatres resembled the control room of the Mars mission. As one trained in the BC era (Before Computers = Before Christ) it is obvious to me that surgery is changing. […]
Krishnan Ganapathy: Is your doctor healthy enough?
Several years ago in a study carried out at the Dept of Neurosurgery in AIIMS New Delhi, the authors continuously monitored the pulse rate, blood pressure and ECG of neurosurgeons while they were operating, and correlated it with the actual surgical steps in different procedures. It was observed that the pulse rate and blood pressure […]
No (wo)man is an island…and neither is Britain when it comes to violence and HIV
Emma Bell, Susan Bewley, Silvia Petretti, Lynda Shentall, and Alice Welbourn. Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) [1], increases the vulnerability of women and girls to acquiring HIV. Research from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and now the UK shows that gender based violence, of which IPV is one part, is also experienced by women with HIV—often precipitated […]
Rej Bhumbra: Global surgery—global wellness
The Chinese phrase, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” is widely used, but its principles hold true, especially if you are working in the field of global surgery. A meeting organised at the Royal College of Surgeons […]
Amir Attaran and Marvin Shepherd: Denialism and India’s risky medicine
Governments that lie are dangerous to public health [1]. South Africa’s shameless denial that HIV causes AIDS delayed treatment for millions, and many needlessly died. Now India’s government is doing something similarly brazen by denying that India exports fake medicines to Africa. It is an untruth for which India must apologize and which it must […]
Farah Kidy on volunteering in India with the Institute of Rural Health Studies
After years of planning and plotting, I was finally getting ready to head off to India. This was going to be a voyage of discovery; I was going to explore my roots, live village life, and hopefully, “do a bit of good.” I arrived at Hyderabad’s shiny new airport—complete with a WH Smith and a […]
Shalini: A 100 million lives, up in smoke
So it seems that the apocalypse didn’t occur and the world hasn’t come to an end. 2012 is not the end of existence as we know it—the Mayans were wrong. But take a closer look, and you wonder if the prophecy was true after all. The Mayans thought it would be a big storm, but […]