The quality of implementation of the National Rural Health Mission in a number of states has transformed the public healthcare system considerably. Learning from these improvements which have focused on the grass roots, local recruitment is the best way to forge a credible public health system that has public accountability.

The recommendations of the Planning Commission’s High Level Expert Group on Access to Universal Healthcare are significant because they make explicit the need to contextualise health within the rights. However, the problem with the report is that it does not ask why many of the same recommendations that were made by previous committees have not been implemented. The HLEG neither recognises the problems, constraints and compulsions at the national, state and district levels nor offers any solutions on how to deal with them.

Public health policies such as tobacco control, air pollution reduction, and hazardous waste remediation may have reduced cadmium exposure among U.S. adults. However, trends in urine cadmium, a marker of cumulative cadmium exposure, have not been evaluated. The authors estimated the trends in urine cadmium concentrations in U.S. adults using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) from 1988 to 2008.

On August 1, 2011 the movement for banning chewing tobacco in India saw a turn in its favour. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), a statutory body under the health ministry to handle food-related issues, notified a new regulation called the Food Safety and Standards (Prohibition and Restrictions on Sales) Regulations, 2011. It states under rule 2.3.4 that "product not to contain any substance which may be injurious to health: tobacco and nicotine shall not be used as ingredients in any food products".

This refers to the paper: “Catastrophic Payments and Impoverishment Due to Out-of-Pocket Health Spending” (19 November 2011) by Soumitra Ghosh. The paper contains some very good analysis of the data on healthcare expenditures in India. We would, however, like to take this opportunity to debate some of the conceptual underpinnings of the paper. (Letters)

The AMRI crime is an example of how public safety is being repeatedly compromised. More specifically, it demonstrated the dismal trend of healthcare services being offered by “super specialty care” in public-private partnerships, which has raised the cost of medical treatment to exorbitant levels and deprived the poor of even basic treatment.

In 2008, India’s Labour Ministry launched a hospital insurance scheme called Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) covering ‘Below Poverty Line’ (BPL) households. RSBY is implemented through insurance companies; premiums are subsidized by Union and States governments (75 : 25%). We examined RSBY’s enrolment of BPL, costs vs. budgets and policy ramifications.

Over several centuries, leprosy had remained a dreaded, incurable disease. Patients were viewed with abhorrence, ostracized and subjected to inhuman treatment. Today, the stigma and prejudice against leprosy have reduced considerably, and the ravages of the disease are rarely seen in the community. This has been possible due the availability of effective drugs to cure the disease, access to technology for early diagnosis, prevention and repair of deformities, as well as increased awareness in society about leprosy. (Editorial)