India, Feb. 15 -- The Supreme Court of India categorises the "rarest of the rare" cases for possible imposition of the death penalty. Of late, courts have dealt with a different category of "rarest of the rare", and it is in the context of diseases. The commonality among both the categories is the decision between life and death. And the disease in question is known as the orphan disease. What would cause a disease to acquire the moniker "orphan"? In the world of rare diseases, it connotes diseases that are even rarer than rare. In the United States, it is a disease that afflicts less than one in 200,000 people. In India, we don't have a definition of orphan diseases just yet, and the ministry of health and family welfare proposes to task the Indian Council of Medical Research with the project of defining this category of disease, in its new draft policy on rare diseases....