(On research to bring about needle-free injections, attempts to regulate prices in the private healthcare sector, the need for more people to be trained in CPR and more)

It’s the season of gift-giving, goodwill and all things cheery, and in that spirit, here’s bringing you all of the good news, health-wise, that this week has had to offer.

First off, for those of you who hate needles (and let’s face it: many of us do), researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, have developed what they say is a painless, needle-free, ‘shock syringe,’ writes Purnima Sah. Unlike syringes with needles, the shock syringe does not rely on piercing the skin with a sharp tip. Instead, it uses high-energy pressure waves (shock waves) that can travel faster than the speed of sound to pierce the skin. The entire process of delivering drugs with this shock syringe is rapid and gentle; most patients wouldn’t feel a thing, the researchers say. Sounds good doesn’t it? Let’s hope this innovation gets approved of and is available to patients sooner rather than later.

In more welcome news, calls to regulate private hospital charges are growing louder: Bindu Shajan Perappadan reports on health coalition Jan Swasthya Abhiyan’s petition in this regard. In a country where about 10 crore people are pushed into poverty each year due to healthcare costs and where prices and standards of care are completely unregulated at present, even a conversation that begins to explore this issue is a step in the right direction. We’ll keep you posted about developments in this matter. But even while this is a discussion that needs to be had, a parallel one needs to be about the urgent necessity for increased government spending on healthcare, and this is what the new national president of the Indian Medical Association, Dilip P. Bhanushali, underscored to Siddharth Kumar Singh in an interview.

Our next piece of news is more interesting than perhaps good: pharmaceutical company AbbVie Healthcare India was reprimanded for ‘unethical marketing practices’ after it was found that it sponsored international trips for 30 doctors, spending nearly ₹1.91 crore in breach of the Uniform Code for Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices, 2024. The National Medical Council has also been asked to act against the 30 doctors. While this may be considered an ‘acceptable industry practice’, which is what the pharma company claimed, it is heartening to see the Code being upheld.

Staying in the pharma lane for a little longer, the Health Minister of Karnataka, Dinesh Gunda Rao, has proposed information sharing and a centralised database between drug control departments of various States in order to deal with the vexing and sometimes fatal issue of not of standard quality (NSQ) drugs flooding the market. A database such as this would help weed out bad players from the market and improve the quality of drugs available in public hospitals, he points out. And Mr. Rao’s suggestion couldn’t be more timely, in November alone, 111 drug samples tested at Central and State labs were found to be NSQ, even as spurious drugs worth ₹6.6 crore were seized in Kolkata this week.

What happens when drugs for a particular condition are available abroad but not in India? In order to give patients here speedier access to such drugs, the government has now waived the necessity for local clinical trials for certain drugs from a set of specified countries. While patient advocacy groups are happy that this will accelerate access to life-saving treatments, experts have warned that India’s population diversity means that bypassing local trials could result in unanticipated adverse effects or reduced efficacy. Clearly, a double-edged sword.

Here’s a quick wrap-up of news from abroad. Sadly, it’s not been good. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called for an end to attacks on hospitals in Gaza after Israel struck one and raided another in the past few days. This comes just days after Dr. Tedros narrowly escaped from an Israeli airstrike in Yemen.

Shall we end this year with a little quiz? See if you can guess the answer to this question: Which infectious disease is likely to be the biggest emerging problem in 2025? Here’s a hint: the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently said samples from one patient who had this disease, were shown to have rare mutations.

And if you’ve successfully answered that and are now wondering what your New Year’s resolution should be, do make it attending a course on cardiopulmonary resuscitation or CPR -- as R. Sujatha tells us in this week’s tailpiece, immediate action by a bystander trained in CPR can double or triple survival chances for a person who suffers a sudden cardiac arrest.

We have a wide-ranging list of explainers for you to pore over this holiday week:

In the light of  poliovirus being detected through routine surveillance of wastewater systems in five countries, Ramya Kannan writes on a research paper where the authors argue that the earlier the oral polio vaccine is replaced with the injectable polio vaccine, the faster the world will reach global polio eradication.

C. Aravinda delves into population dynamics, making a case for governments to focus not on dismantling family planning programmes, but on enabling healthy life expectancies, where adults can live in good health and stay productive into their 70s.

I podcast about the dangers of overusing the common, over-the-counter drug paracetamol.

If sleep has been an issue amongst the children in your family, here is Maria Antony’s checklist on what sleep disorders are and how to handle them.

Shrabana Chatterjee writes about a recent Indian Council of Medical Research paper that found traditional fermented foods of the North East are prone to contamination.

Anoop Kumar A.S. and Anish T.S., on the occasion of International Day of Epidemic Preparedness detail the steps India needs to take to build a resilient healthcare system, one that learns from the lessons of the Nipah outbreaks in Kerala.

Why do we lose muscle mass with age? D.P. Kasbekar writes about one new factor that scientists have found.

And finally, in Tamil Nadu, Serena Josephine M. writes about a robust dengue surveillance system that may now be throwing up a large number of cases but has drastically reduced the number of deaths.

Here’s wishing all of our readers a happy and healthy new year!

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