From establishing screening of donor blood for hepatitis B virus infection in 1972 to testing pulse polio immunisation in 1981, and detecting HIV infection in women commercial sex workers in 1986, the Department of Clinical Virology of Christian Medical College (CMC) has come a long way.
Wednesday marked the beginning of yet another journey of the department, as its Golden Jubilee celebrations took off with a one-day scientific seminar in the midst of those who gave it a shape through various pioneering works.
It was in 1966 that a virus research laboratory was established in CMC, with technical and financial support from Centre for Disease Control (CDC), USA. Roger Feldman of CDC established and directed the laboratory for two years.
T. Jacob John joined the lab in the same year, and went on to head it. He added diagnostic virology service to research for which reason the unit was called Department of Virology. This was, in fact, India’s first diagnostic virology laboratory, a press release said.
“One of the biggest contributions of the department has to be in polio eradication. Polio eradication required a lot of mid-course correction. While the western world had no difficulty in getting rid of it as the vaccine worked correctly, the virus would not go away in tropical countries like India. We had research on why this was so,” Dr. John said.
In 1972, the department documented very low efficacy of oral polio vaccine. Several methods were designed and field tested to give assured protection of children against polio.
“We coined the term ‘pulse immunisation’. This was a way to improve the performance of the vaccination,” he added. Pulse immunisation was tested in 1981 resulting in polio-free Vellore in 1982 and 1983. Eventually, pulse polio immunisation was adopted nationally for polio eradication.
Achievements aplenty
The department also established the developing world’s first screening of donor blood for hepatitis B virus infection for protecting transfusion recipients in 1972. Seven years later, the Indian Council of Medical Research declared it as a Centre of Excellence.
On finding that three per cent of rural children could not see their fifth birthday due to one disease – measles – the department spearheaded a community campaign and launched measles vaccine in the late 1970s.
“In 1985, we teamed up with the National Institute of Health, US to search for HIV infection. We established a unit and detected the infection in women commercial sex workers in remand homes in Chennai, Madurai and Vellore. We also established the transmission was heterosexual,” Dr. John explained. They went on to screen men with sexually transmitted diseases.
Sunil Chandy, director of CMC, said that the role of basic laboratories was not acknowledged enough. “We have diagnostic accuracy and quality in clinical outcomes. This is irrefutably because of virology, pathology, microbiology and clinical pathology,” he said.
He said that the department of virology was called to the frontier when there was an epidemic, most recently, during the Japanese Encephalitis outbreak in Gorakhpur.
The Golden Jubilee celebration will end with a National Virology Conference in July 2017.
