02.29.08

Reliance Life Insurance launches Reliance Wealth + Health Plan

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:53 pm by heaven

Life insurance major Reliance Life Insurance has launched the first-of-its-kind Reliance Wealth + Health Plan, a unit linked plan coupled with health benefits. The launch was announced by Mr. P. Nandagopal, CEO, Reliance Life Insurance. The Reliance Wealth + Health Plan is the first wealth creation product that also offers comprehensive health coverage as a key differentiator in the domestic insurance market. "The unique proposition of this plan is that it offers complete investment flexibility to grow wealth by investing in different plans and funds and also provides the financial support for managing health expenses. It is in line with our strategy to offer best-in-class products to our customers" said Nandagopal while launching the product. The plan offers the convenience of cashless payments, cover for the entire family under one plan and the option to increase life cover to provide additional security. "With annual premium as low as Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000 per annum, the insured can get health and saving benefits and protect himself/herself against high or unexpected medical bills. The plan provides lumpsum benefit to take care of hospitalization expenses, which include daily hospitalization expenditure, intensive care unit expenses and post-hospitalization spending in the form of recuperation benefits", he said. The plan offers enhanced health coverage against life threatening illnesses and major surgeries, with all insured having an option to cover themselves against untoward incidents as well. Likewise that the amount towards medical expenses can be availed a number of times in a year and up to 95 per cent of the fund value can be withdrawn during the policy period. "The policyholder can avail all the benefits with all features of ULIP for maximum flexibility and liquidity, minimizing risk, maximizing returns and averaging cost of units. The plan also contains coverage's with a bouquet of riders available for all lives under the policy and has significantly lower charges and free switches for best risk appetite fund. This is the only plan that provides such additional value with a maturity benefit at the end of the policy term" said Mr Nandagopal. The product is expected to contribute 35-40% of the total sales of the January-March quarter, 2008. ''We expect a significant business growth on the back of this product, as so far people have not been provided with adequate choice of quality insurance products,'' he added.

Government extends 5 yr tax holiday for all hospitals

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:53 pm by heaven

MUMBAI: Government on Friday extended a five-year tax holiday, currently given only to hospitals in the rural areas, to those across the country, sending the shares of healthcare providers higher.

The Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, in his budget for 2008/09, also proposed an excise duty of 8 per cent for all goods produced in the pharmaceutical sector, down from 16 per cent.

He also proposed to reduce by half the customs duty on certain specified life saving drugs, and its bulk drug ingredients, to 5 per cent. These drugs would also be exempted from excise or countervailing duties.


Hospital stocks such as Apollo Hospitals, Fortis Healthcare and Malar Hospitals were up between 2-6 per cent after the finance minister proposed the tax holiday.

The other drug stocks, which rose immediately after the excise and customs duty cuts, have since fallen or are trading flat.

Aurobindo Pharma was up 1.3 per cent, Cadila rose 2.7 per cent, Dishman was 3.6 per cent higher while Wockhardt was up 1.1 per cent.

02.27.08

In India, killing for organs not yet on, but it is on in the US

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:52 pm by heaven

WASHINGTON: Doctors in India have apprently not reached the stage of killing their patients to have quick access to their key organs such as kidneys and livers etc. Believe it or not, such is not the case with the medical fraternity in the United States. In a bizarre case, a California-based surgeon, Dr. Hootan C. Roozrokh, has been charged with prescribing excessive and improper doses of drugs to hasten the death of one of his patients, Ruben Navarro, to retrieve his organs sooner.

A court is expected to beging a preliminary hearing of three felony counts against Dr. Roozrokh today in relation to Mr. Navarro's treatment as a donor. At the heart of the case is whether Dr. Roozrokh, who studied at a transplant fellowship program at the Stanford University School of Medicine, was pursuing organs at any cost or had become entangled in a web of misunderstanding about a lesser-used harvesting technique known as "donation after cardiac death."

Several days after Navarro was hospitalized at California's Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center, a decision was made to remove his ventilator. According to the criminal complaint, Dr. Roozrokh ordered excessive doses of morphine and Ativan, an anti-anxiety medicine, both of which are used to comfort dying patients. In the most shocking accusation, the complaint said Dr. Roozrokh introduced Betadine, a topical antiseptic, into Navarro's system; Betadine, the complaint said, is "a harmful substance that may cause death if ingested."


Navarro died about eight hours later of what the coroner ruled was natural causes. In the end, however, because his death was not more immediate, his organs had deteriorated too much to be usable for transplant. Prosecutors have charged Dr. Roozrokh with felony counts of dependent adult abuse, mingling a harmful substance (Betadine) and prescribing a controlled substance (morphine and Ativan) without medical purpose. Dr. Roozrokh has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer said the charges were the result of overzealous prosecutors. But the case has sent a shudder through the tight-knit field of transplant surgeons.

If convicted on all counts, Dr. Roozrokh could face eight years in prison -- while also worrying donation advocacy groups that organ donors could be frightened away. David Fleming, the executive director of Donate Life America, a nonprofit group that promotes donations, said the case had "given some support to the myths and misperceptions we spend an inordinate amount of time telling people won't happen."

The New York Times quoted Fleming as saying that about 18 people a day die in the United States waiting for transplants, and this has created a tremendous demand for donor organs. However,over the years the medical community has established strict protocols to govern organ harvesting. Transplanting organs from patients whose hearts have stopped, or cardiac-death donations, began to go out of vogue in the late 1960s and early '70s after medical advances like life support and subsequent changes in the legal definition of death made donations from those declared brain dead more efficient.

But health officials have encouraged cardiac-death donations in recent years. There were 670 cardiac-death donations through the first nine months of 2007, the most in any year this decade, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which oversees organ allocation. Over the same period, there were 12,553 brain-dead donations, according to the network.

In brain-death donations, the donor is legally dead, but machines keep the organs viable by machines. In cardiac-death donations, after the patient's ventilator is removed, the heart slows. Once it stops, brain function ceases. Most donor protocols call for a five-minute delay before the patient is declared dead. Transplant teams are not allowed in the room of the potential donor before that.

Shasun Chemicals enters non-exclusive deal with Merck

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:52 pm by heaven

MUMBAI: Shasun Chemicals has entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Merck & Co Inc.

As per the agreement, Shasun will grant Merck the use of its proprietary cross-coupling copper technology to manufacture and commercialise active pharmaceutical ingredients.

The Buchwald cross-coupling technology is one of the most popular technologies in the pharmaceutical area allowing increasingly complex new drugs to be manufactured in an efficient and economical way.

"This is an important milestone for Shasun in making this technology widely accessible and paving the way for further collaborations," said Michel Spagnol, chief technology officer of Shasun.

At 1:19 pm, Shasun Chemicals shares were up 5.66 per cent at Rs 59.70 on BSE.

Popping antidepressants may not help depressed people

Posted in Uncategorized at 3:52 pm by heaven

WASHINGTON: Antidepressant medications appear to help only very severely depressed people and work no better than placebos in many patients, British researchers said on Monday. Researchers led by the Irving Kirsch of the University of Hull reviewed a series of studies, both published and unpublished, on four antidepressants, examining the question of whether a person’s response to these drugs hinged on how depressed they were before getting treatment.

They were Eli Lilly and Co’s Prozac, also known as fluoxetine, Wyeth’s Effexor, also called venlafaxine; GlaxoSmithKline’s Paxil, also called Seroxat or paroxetine, and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co’s drug Serzone, also called nefazodone, which it no longer markets in the US. They are all so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.

The researchers found that compared with placebo, these new-generation antidepressant medications didn’t yield clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially had moderate or even very severe depression. The study found that significant benefits occurred only in the most severely depressed patients.

“Drug-placebo differences in antidepressant efficacy increase as a function of baseline severity, but are relatively small even for severely depressed patients. The relationship between initial severity and antidepressant efficacy is attributable to decreased responsiveness to placebo among very severely depressed patients, rather than to increased responsiveness to medication,” the researchers wrote.

The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration for the licensing of the four drugs. “Although patients get better when they take antidepressants, they also get better when they take a placebo, and the difference in improvement is not very great. This means that depressed people can improve without chemical treatments,” Kirsch said in a statement.

But Mary Ann Rhyne, a spokeswoman for Paxil maker GSK, said the study only looked at data submitted prior to the drug’s US approval. “The authors have failed to acknowledge the very positive benefit these treatments have provided to patients and their families who are dealing with depression and they are at odds with what has been seen in actual clinical practice,” Rhyne said.

“This analysis has only examined a small subset of the total data available, while regulatory bodies around the world have conducted extensive reviews and evaluations of all of the data available,” she said.

Doug Petkus, a spokesman for Wyeth, maker of Effexor, said he had not seen the study and could not comment.

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