The recent decline in fertility in India has been unprecedented especially in southern India, where fertility is almost exclusively controlled by means of permanent contraceptive methods, mainly female sterilization, which constitutes about two-thirds of overall contraceptive use. Many Indian women undergo sterilization at relatively young ages as a consequence of early marriage and childbearing in short birth intervals.

Data for trends in contraceptive use and need are necessary to guide programme and policy decisions and to monitor progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5, which calls for universal access to contraceptive services. The researchers therefore aimed to estimate trends in contraceptive use and unmet need in developing countries in 2003, 2008, and 2012 .

Original Source

In recent years, there has been much work done due to increasing recognition that children need better medicines. The United States of America and the European Union have adopted regulations to encourage research and development of medicines for children; the World Health Organization (WHO) has been promoting “Make medicines child size”; and researchers and academics are starting to respond to the many unanswered questions about medicines for children, through research and international collaboration.

For a country which is home to one-third of the world's poor, it has been the most striking failure of our public health system to reach out to them. It is not that some of the social or religious groups in particular lack access to quality healthcare facilities, but that the poor in general get excluded. They are often forced to incur high out-of-pocket expenditure on health which only adds to their debt burden.

Issues of gender inequity remain in India and impede the nation's public health and development. Any effort toward universal health care in India must at inception be aligned with the broader goals of improving the status of women and girls in the country, or be destined to fail.

Many international statements have urged researchers, policy-makers and health care providers to collaborate in efforts to bridge the gaps between research, policy and practice in low- and middle-income countries. We surveyed researchers in 10 countries about their involvement in such efforts.

Gaps continue to exist between research-based evidence and clinical practice. We surveyed health care pro viders in 10 low- and middle-income countries about their use of research-based evidence and examined factors that may facilitate or impede such use.

India