Enabling cross-country learning and exchange to support universal health coverage implementation.

As countries transition from external assistance while pursuing ambitious plans to achieve universal health coverage (UHC), there is increasing need to facilitate knowledge sharing and learning among them. Country-led and country-owned knowledge management is foundational to sustainable, more equitable external assistance for health and is a useful complement to more conventional capacity-building modalities provided under external assistance. In the context of external assistance, few initiatives use country-to-country sharing of practitioner experiences, and link learning to receiving guidance on how to adapt, apply and sustain policy changes.

Variation in cost and performance of routine immunisation service delivery in India.

A comprehensive understanding of the costs of routine vaccine delivery is essential for planning, budgeting and sustaining India's Universal Immunisation Programme. India currently allocates approximately US$25 per child for vaccines and operational costs. This budget is prepared based on historical expenditure data as information on cost is not available.

An extended cost-effectiveness analysis of schizophrenia treatment in India under universal public finance.

Background: Schizophrenia remains a priority condition in mental health policy and service development because of its early onset, severity and consequences for affected individuals and households.

Aims And Methods: This paper reports on an 'extended' cost-effectiveness analysis (ECEA) for schizophrenia treatment in India, which seeks to evaluate through a modeling approach not only the costs and health effects of intervention but also the consequences of a policy of universal public finance (UPF) on health and financial outcomes across income quintiles.

Results: Using plausible values for input parameters, we conclude that health gains from UPF are concentrated among the poorest, whereas the non-health gains in the form of out-of-pocket private expenditures averted due to UPF are concentrated among the richest income quintiles.

Epithelial neoplasia in Drosophila entails switch to primitive cell states.

Only select cell types in an organ display neoplasia when targeted oncogenically. How developmental lineage hierarchies of these cells prefigure their neoplastic propensities is not yet well-understood. Here we show that neoplastic Drosophila epithelial cells reverse their developmental commitments and switch to primitive cell states.

Supported and unsupported claims in medicinal drug advertisements in Indian medical journals.

The study assessed 292 supported and unsupported claims in 102 medicinal drug advertisements across 15 Indian medical journals published in 2009. WHO ethical criteria for medicinal drug promotion were applied. None of the advertisements satisfied all the WHO criteria.