The Hindu : Front Page : Advertisements for medical treatment to be banned

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jan 23, 2007
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Advertisements for medical treatment to be banned

Ramya Kannan

Proposal will be submitted soon, says Anbumani

Anbumani Ramadoss. — File photo

CHENNAI: The Union Health Ministry intends to ban advertisement of treatment processes under the Drugs and Magical Remedies Act.

A proposal to this effect will be drafted by the Ministry soon, Union Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss has said.

This would require amendments to the Act, which had hitherto prohibited only advertisement of drugs or `magical cures' for certain diseases.

This move follows the controversy late last year after the Ministry sent a notice to the yoga Guru Baba Ramdev questioning his claims of curing cancer and HIV/AIDS. The amendment would seek to curb these kinds of advertisements, promising cures through allopathy or alternative systems of medicine, he said in an interview to The Hindu .

The Ministry, along with the Surface Transport Ministry, intends to build trauma care centres along national highways, he said. The plan was to provide a phone booth every five km, a basic trauma centre every 100 km, establish a speciality trauma centre every 300 km and a superspeciality trauma centre every 500 km.

Mapping of national highways was on and the Ministry identified government establishments that could be part of the large network on the Golden Quadrilateral route. The project, expected to cost between Rs.1,000-2,000 crore, would also involve training of staff of ambulances and hospitals along the routes in emergency medicine.

Through an amendment to the Prevention of Food and Drug Adulteration Act, which would come into force from August 2007, a ban would be placed on sale of products made from tobacco. According to Rule 44J, "Tobacco and nicotine shall not be used as ingredients in any food products." This was calculated to remove products such as gutka and pan masala from the purview of the Act and place them within the purview of the Tobacco Act, under which the sale of products containing these substances was more stringently regulated.

Streamlining rules

The Minister also said a lot of procedures in registering and licencing of doctors would be streamlined this year. To be registered as a medical practitioner, every MBBS graduate was mandated to undergo one year posting in a rural area. Based in the district headquarters hospital, the graduate would be sent to different primary health centres in turns. "Over 29,000 people pass out of medical colleges every year. If all of them go through this routine, we will be able to stem the huge gap in the availability of medical professionals in rural areas," he said. This, along with the National Rural Health Mission, would be able to increase access to quality health care in villages.

Also, doctors were required to re-register themselves every five years after completing 60 hours of continuing medical education. All hospitals and diagnostic centres would have to be registered. Within three years of registering, the hospitals must fulfil the new set of requirements.

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