"Linking superbug to India irrational" PTI
India on Thursday described as “totally irrational” British scientists linking a new superbug resistant to antibiotics to this country and said it was responding to an alert issued by Britain in this regard.
V. M. Katoch, Secretary of Health Research, told PTI that the government would soon draft a reply to this after a meeting of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), a nodal agency under the Health Ministry.
“When you link it to something to our anti-biotics policy, say India specific, say it is dangerous to get operated in India then you will get more infections, that is totally irrational,” he said.
Sinister design of multinationals
The issue also figured in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday where members suspected the hands of multinational pharmaceutical and hospital companies behind the claims.
“When India is emerging as a medical tourism destination, this type of news is unfortunate and may be a sinister design of multinational companies” to defame the Indian medical sector, S. S. Ahluwalia (BJP) said.
Demanding a response from the government, he said some foreign tourists after returning from India reported some infection and attributed it to Indian hospitals. “It may not be true,” he said.
Mr. Ahluwalia, who was supported by Jayanti Natarajan (Congress), said there should be a system of maintaining a registry for patients suffering from infectious diseases.
Ms. Natarajan said reports of superbug, attributable to India, is a “wrong propaganda against the country“.
National disease centre to meet today
The National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), a nodal agency under the Health Ministry, is meeting on Thursday and “we would soon draft a reply to this,” Secretary, Health Research, V.M. Katoch told PTI.
He said the Ministry will examine the issue in detail but it was “unfortunate that this new bug, which is an environmental thing, has been attached to a particular country which is India in this case.”
“I am surprised,” he said, adding that, “this (the bug) is present in nature. It is a random event and cannot be transmitted.”
Mr. Katoch said that he was surprised that a research paper linked it with India as they should know it was a biological phenomenon.
According to a paper published in scientific journal Lancet, the new superbug, which is said to be resistant even to most powerful antibiotics, has entered U.K. hospitals and is travelling with patients who had gone to countries like India and Pakistan for surgical treatments.
Bacteria that make an enzyme called NDM-1 or New Delhi-Metallo-1, have travelled back with NHS patients who went abroad to countries like India and Pakistan for treatments such as cosmetic surgery, it said.
Although there have only been about 50 cases identified in the U.K. so far, scientists fear it will go global.
NDM-1 can exist inside different bacteria, like Ecoli, and it makes them resistant to one of the most powerful groups of antibiotics — carbapenems.
These are generally reserved for use in emergencies and to combat hard-to-treat infections caused by other multi-resistant bacteria.
At least one of the NDM-1 infections the researchers analysed was resistant to all known antibiotics.
Similar infections have been seen in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the Netherlands and international researchers say that NDM-1 could become a major global health problem.
Infections have already been passed from patient to patient in U.K. hospitals.
Dr David Livermore, one of the researchers and who works for the UK’s Health Protection Agency (HPA), said, “There have been a number of small clusters within the UK, but far and away the greater number of cases appear to be associated with travel and hospital treatment in the Indian subcontinent.”
The Department of Health has already put out an alert on the issue, he said.
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