China Going Green? January 4, 2007
Posted by Confused in Environment.add a comment
As China rapidly develops, it’s getting increasingly concerned about the envoironment.
Is China getting serious about the environment, albeit out of concern for its continued economic growth? Seed magazine (via AFP) picks up two telling stories: First, China has just released its first official report on global climate change. The report concludes that greenhouse gases from human activity are leading to climate change, and that economic growth could be hindered if global warming continued. The report warns that temperatures could rise in the Middle Kingdom by 1.3-2.1 degrees Celsius by 2020, and by as many as 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Given that 2006 was China’s hottest year in half a century and thousands died from widespread droughts, the new report no doubt reflects a concerned Beijing.[link]
Two short comments-
a. China is concerned that envoironmental damage could potentially affect it’s growth.
b. It’s increasingly clear that as nations develop and are able to meet primary needs of their people, they do get concerned about more abstract aspects like envoironment. However, it would be futile for the West to expect them to be concerned before economic development happens.
On Foreign Universities January 4, 2007
Posted by Confused in Education, India.1 comment so far
National Knowledge Commission has recommended allowing foreign universities to set shop in India.
Foreign educational institutions should be allowed in with policies that ensure that “there is an incentive for good institutions and a disincentive for sub-standard institutions to come to India”. It also clearly proposes that a “level-playing field must be ensured and all rules that apply to domestic institutions should also be applicable to foreign institutions. (emphasis mine)[link]
While the proposal to allow foreign universities must be welcomed, the devil lies in the fine print. The universities would be allowed only if they follow ‘all domestic rules’. This would include, apart from being forced to follow government reservation mandates, regulations on the levels of fees they can charge. It is open to question whether top foreign universities would be interested in opening campuses if they are forced to deal with the legendary Indian bureaucracy and constant interference from the University Grants Commission. The NKC, to it’s credit has recommended setting up a Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education(IRAHE) to take away the regulatory powers from the Human Resources Development Ministry. This proposal would meet strong resistance from the mandarins of the ministry and it remains to be seen if the Prime Minister can summon enough courage to take them on.
Interestingly enough, on the same day the NKC submitted it’s report to the government, the Vice Chairman of the commission, Dr. P.M Bhargava came out strongly against the entry of foreign universities.
The move to invite foreign universities to offer education in India today came under attack from Vice Chairman of National Knowledge Commission P M Bhargava who said it would lead to commercialization of higher education.”This move is to commodities education. Education is not at all a commodity,” …”No good university will come. The second grade and third grade university will come and make profits in the name of quality education,” he told a news agency later.[link]
Dr. Bhargava doesn’t explain why only second or third grade university would be come. Is it because of the policies his commission has recommended?
Dr. Bhargava’s whole premise of commercialization of higher education is, to put it mildly, ridiculous. By the commission own estimates, only 7% of Indians have access to higher education-how many of those are sufficiently equipped for today’s knowledge economy is another matter altogether. The government which cites lack of funds as reason for not being able to guarantee primary education should surely not invest more in higher education, especially when there are private parties willing to share the burden. And it’s not as if government own institutions are doing a stellar job . Yes, there are enough private institutions which are nothing more than ‘educational shops’. But they are merely symptomatic of the larger problem-due to the excessive regulations and constant government interference, only the political elite is able to set up universities. That such institutions still thrive is indicative of an unmet demand and pointer towards more liberalization.
So while I applaud Dr. Bhargava’s thinking that every Indian university can be turned into a Harvard and wish him luck, the more realistic elements in the government must work hard towards creating a conducive environment for attracting top universities. That such universities are not exactly enamored by the government is patently clear.
(Bhargava link via RJ who comments on it here)
Revamping the health care system January 3, 2007
Posted by BongoP'o'ndit in Health.add a comment
In an interview with New York Times, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen offers some radical proposals to improve the US health care system (link via).
Prof Christensen believes that the current system is woefully inefficient in terms of affordability and accessibility. His basic premise is that with advances in medical diagnoses and cures, treatment of certain diseases should be more widely available rather than being restricted to a handful of trained professionals (ie doctors, with apologies to my co-blogger!) and institutions (hospitals).
The whole interview is worth reading, but here are some parts that I found intriguing.
Q. The nation’s medical system is regularly offering increasingly advanced procedures and treatments. Isn’t that a good thing?
A. If you look at the progress that today’s hospitals and the medical profession have made, they continue to push the leading edge of what’s very difficult to do. But that’s a very different dimension of performance improvement than the one that makes more people better off, and that is making it affordable and accessible. In other industries, whenever affordability and accessibility have come, it has not come from making mainframe computers better but rather from commoditizing mainframes so that average people with average money can have access to high-quality computing, meaning personal computers. It came from disruptive technology rather than improvements on the existing system. Michael Dell could assemble one of these things in his dorm room.
Q. What’s the relevance to health care?
A. In health care, rather than replicating the expensive expertise of Mount Sinai Medical Center or Mass General Hospital or replicating the expensive expertise of doctors, we have to commoditize their expertise. That comes through the precise ability to diagnose the diseases that people have. Our ability to diagnose the diseases is moving ahead at a breathtaking pace, but regulation and reimbursement are trapping the delivery of rules-based medicine in high-cost business models.
Q. Are you saying doctors rather than the pharmaceutical industry are the root cause of what’s gone wrong?
A. The pharmaceutical industry has been focused on therapy, not diagnosis. The medical profession has simply accepted that many of these diseases are well-diagnosed, when in fact they aren’t. As a consequence, we haven’t moved the health care profession into a world where nurses can provide diagnosis and care. Regulation is keeping the treatment in expensive hospitals when in fact much lower cost-delivery models are available.
……
Q. Wouldn’t your solution require a dramatically different regulatory environment?
A. It differs state by state. In Massachusetts, nurses cannot write prescriptions. But in Minnesota, nurse practitioners can. So there has emerged in Minnesota a clinic called the MinuteClinic. These clinics operate in Target stores and CVS drugstores. They are staffed only by nurse practitioners. There’s a big sign on the door that says, “We treat these 16 rules-based disorders.” They include strep throat, pink eye, urinary tract infection, earaches and sinus infections.
These are things for which very unambiguous, “go, no-go” tests exist. You’re in and out in 15 minutes or it’s free, and it’s a $39 flat fee. These things are just booming because high-quality health care at that level is defined by convenience and accessibility. That’s a commoditization of the expertise. To have those same disorders treated in Massachusetts, you’ve got to go to a regular doctor, go through a long wait in their office, you go in and see the doctor for two minutes. He says, “You have an earache,” which you knew already, and then they charge you $150.
Having gone through the experience of being offered an appointment three weeks in future for a current cold symptom, and then having to wait hours in various rooms to see a doctor for ten minutes, the idea of such small clinics are particularly welcome (there is actually one being built alongside our neighborhood Eckerd).
My main question is whether medical science is really at that stage when a majority of diagnosis can be confidently prescribed by such ‘go, no-go’ metrics ?
The professor also talks about the problem of having non-integrated players in the health care system:
The current health care system is divided into buckets. You have the insurers, the employers who put up the money, the providers such as doctors and nurses, and the hospitals. Because they exist as independent companies, they can each improve themselves, but they can’t re-architect the system in the way that it needs to be changed.
There are two health care systems in the West, Intermountain Health Care in Utah and Kaiser Permanente in California, that are in fact integrated across each of those pieces of the system. They are far ahead of the rest of the world in bringing rules-based diagnosis and therapy in cost-effective business models to their patients.
Of course, all these changes cannot happen without a strong will from the government to overcome the regulatory framework of the current system.
The government will be the hardest because a lot of the regulations that require that care be given by people with particular expertise and in expensive hospitals were put in place during a prior era when the science was not really as well-defined. The regulations just haven’t kept up with the science.
[Cross-posted here]
Slashing Cost Of Drugs January 2, 2007
Posted by Confused in Health, Innovation.4 comments
One of the biggest problems which developing nations face is the high cost of drugs. The patents are generally held by giant Western pharmaceutical companies who exploit their monopoly status to drive up prices. African nations have faced prohibhitive costs with H.I.V drugs and India will face the same challenges as it completes the change from a regime of process patents to product patents. Can this help?
Two UK-based academics have devised a way to invent new medicines and get them to market at a fraction of the cost charged by big drug companies, enabling millions in poor countries to be cured of infectious diseases and potentially slashing the NHS drugs bill. Sunil Shaunak, professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College, based at Hammersmith hospital, calls their revolutionary new model “ethical pharmaceuticals”. [link]
The crucial question here is the level of innovation. Could the two professors have ‘invented’ their new drug without the basic molecular structure developed by the pharmaceutical companies? Developing new drugs costs hundreds of millions of dollars simply because a lot of compounds don’t come through trials, they might be actually show promise in animal trials but fail the human ones. So a company developing a successful drug not only attempts to recoup the cost of development of that particular drug but also of those compunds which failed. I remember that an Indian pharmaceutical company, Dr. Reddy’s lab had developed a potentially winning compound which it preferred to sell to an American company rather than take the risk of going through a clinical trial. The cost of failure was potentially so high that it could have put Dr. Reddy out of business.
Patents exist so that the drug companies can recover their investments and make profits, a part of which, at least theoretically, would be invested towards developing new drugs. Disrupting this cycle of innovation can have potentially disastrous effects.
It would of course be very gratifying if researchers like professor Shaunak can actually lower the cost of developing new drugs. Has that happened in this case? The jury is still out on that.
(link via n)
Retail giant pushing environment friendly product January 2, 2007
Posted by BongoP'o'ndit in Environment.2 comments
Walmart, the retailer everyone loves to hate, has decided to push the environment-friendly compact fluorescent light bulbs in its stores. These bulbs use about 75% less energy and last almost ten times longer – but their high cost has been a barrier to widespread use.
…the long-lasting, swirl-shaped light bulbs known as compact fluorescent lamps are to the nation’s energy problem what vegetables are to its obesity epidemic: a near perfect answer, if only Americans could be persuaded to swallow them.
But now Wal-Mart Stores, the giant discount retailer, is determined to push them into at least 100 million homes. And its ambitions extend even further, spurred by a sweeping commitment from its chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., to reduce energy use across the country, a move that could also improve Wal-Mart’s appeal to the more affluent consumers the chain must win over to keep growing in the United States.
[link]
It would be interesting to observe the outcome of a giant like Walmart using its retail might to push a environment-friendly product.
Update- (by confused) Patrix is not too happy with how Walmart is selling the compact fluorescent bulbs-lack of choices and expensive prices. Perhaps, they are just teething troubles.
Getting A Second Opinion January 1, 2007
Posted by Confused in Health, Science.add a comment
Interesting new research points towards the benefits of adopting a team approach in treating patients.
That, not run-of-the-mill second opinions, is what Sabel set out to study when he examined what happened to 149 breast cancer patients who, in one year alone, came to Michigan’s Comprehensive Cancer Center after being diagnosed, biopsied and getting a treatment recommended from a doctor elsewhere. “This was very eye-opening,” he says of the results. Now he wonders, “Is there a benefit to the multidisciplinary approach upfront, rather than seeing a surgeon, then going to the next doctor, then to the next doctor?” The study examined just recommendations for initial surgical treatment, not later chemotherapy or radiation — yet 52 percent of the women had one or more changes urged by the specialty tumor board, Sabel reported in the journal Cancer. [link]
One of the biggest problems in modern medicine is the lack of coordination among treating doctors. This frequently leads to the patient not getting the right treatment especially true in the case of elderly. The team approach makes a lot of sense but for it to work, medicine needs infusion of information technology. Patient records need to more accessible especially to the patient- a simple and cheap device like pen drive can help.
The Right To Education? January 1, 2007
Posted by Confused in Education, India.add a comment
While the government had no trouble in finding 20,000 crore for expanding higher education subsequent to implementation of OBC reservations -a minister explicitly said that ‘money is not a problem’, it seems money indeed is the problem when it comes to ensuring a far more fundamental right. The right to primary education which every kid is entitled to irrespective of his ability to pay.
In May this year, the ministry had circulated a model Right to Education Bill — enforcing penalty provisions for refusing admission to children between 6-14 — to the states, asking them to enact it. As an incentive to implement the proposed law, the ministry had stated that the states that enforce the Education law will get 75 per cent allocation under the Sarva Saksha Abhiyan (SSA) and those who do not, would get only 50 per cent.But the state governments are not ready to take that. Instead, they want the Central government to foot the entire bill that it takes to implement the law. Their argument was that proceeds from the education cess go to the Central government, not to them. The HRD ministry had drawn up an annual estimate of Rs 55,000 crore to implement the Right to Education law but the Planning Commission had expressed its inability to spare that kind of money. It was then that it asked the state governments to implement the law.[link]
Helping Africa January 1, 2007
Posted by Confused in Development.add a comment
University of Illinois professor Andrew P. Morriss explains how to help Africa.
Bono is following up on his hug of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel at Davos last January and with a visit to Germany to launch ???a series of debates with German thinkers on African development and the role of the west.??? (???Geldorf and Bono take G8 campaign to Germany,??? Dec. 27). What is to debate? Only entertainers and politicians could be unaware of the straightforward starting points for solving Africa’s many problems: free trade and governments that neither murder their citizens nor steal their property. The role of the west in implementing these solutions is equally clear: cut tariffs and other barriers to trade with Africa and eliminate official toleration (including foreign aid, official recognition, arms sales, etc.) of murderous regimes like Sudan’s and kleptocratic ones like Zimbabwe???[link]
Branding Vocational Education January 1, 2007
Posted by Confused in Education, India.add a comment
It is not just companies that are talking of branding, the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) has suggested to PM Manmohan Singh that a rebranding exercise be undertaken to deal with the vocational education’s negative association with manual labour. To further assist in this rebranding exercise, the NKC has suggested overhauling the existing industrial training institute (ITI) system. In his letter to PM, NKC chairman Sam Pitroda has suggested that rebranding of vocational education is of the highest priority. “In order to match the modern requirement of the skills and competitiveness of the workforce, a massive rebranding exercise is of the highest priority. [link]
Very sensible suggestions. In fact, they should have gone further and proposed making ITI’s part of the University system. This would really give them brand recognition and elevate their ’status’.
Alcohol Helpful In Brain Trauma December 31, 2006
Posted by Confused in Health, Science.add a comment
A new research suggests that people who have drunk moderate amounts of alcohol are more likely to recover from brain trauma.
The researchers nevertheless found clear evidence that in some cases, a certain amount of alcohol helps the brain recover from blunt trauma injury. And those findings, they said, could lead doctors to develop head injury treatments that involve alcohol preparations. They did, however, point out that as many as half of all patients hospitalised with trauma were intoxicated when they were hurt. Alcohol is believed to play a role in about a third of all deaths from injury. And by impairing motor skills, reaction time and judgment, alcohol increases the risk of injury in almost every imaginable way, leading to car crashes, falls, assaults and self-inflicted wounds. [link]
The implications of the research should be clear enough. Alcohol might help in recovering from head trauma but this is no call for drinking and driving. Why hurt yourself in the first place?
