“Baseless, unfair and circulated with an intention to malign the country's flourishing medical tourism industry,” is how senior doctors in the Capital have responded to the controversy about the new multidrug-resistant “superbug”.
According to a paper published in a scientific journal, the superbug has entered the UK hospitals and is travelling with those patients who had come to other countries including India for surgical treatments.
“The conclusion of the paper is loaded with inference that these resistant genes/organisms possibly originated in India and that it may not be safe for the UK patients to opt for surgery in India. This claim isn't supported by any scientific data,” said a senior State Health official.
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Biotechnologist and former director of the Indian Council of Medical Research Professor N. K. Ganguly said: “It is wrong to say that the superbug originated in India as such organisms have been reported in various European countries in the past.”
Accepting that several private hospitals in the Capital -- which has a large influx of patients from abroad -- will now find themselves in a difficult situation because of the “bad publicity”, senior consultant in the Microbiology Department at B. L. Kapur Hospital Dr. T. D. Chugh said: “This is a difficult situation and will deter the patients from abroad coming to India for treatment. It is also a warning that hospitals need to re-look and re-vamp their hygiene levels. The bad publicity due to the superbug's name (New Delhi metallo beta lactamase (NDM-1), though, is uncalled for.”
Asian Institute of Medical Sciences' internal medicine consultant Dr. Punit Kumar Pruthi said: “Emergence of the superbug has been hyped by the western media. The problem of drug resistance is largely due to indiscriminate and inappropriate use of a broad spectrum of antibiotics. This practice is rampant all over the world and it cannot be attributed to or localised to the Indian sub-continent only.”
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“The hype is mainly to de-motivate patients from the western countries to get treatment in India which they get at much affordable cost. Taking all aseptic precautions while performing a surgery or procedure and following a hospital antibiotic policy are very important factors to prevent the emergence of resistance. More data is required from all over the world to further evaluate this problem rather than relying on a single study,” he added.
A statement issued on Friday by the Hospital Infection Society India and the Indian Association of Medical Microbiologists (Delhi Chapter) noted that antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon for survival in microbes including bacteria.
“In the study being quoted on “superbug”, the research doesn't support the conclusions and in fact the authors of the study themselves mentioned that they cannot prove statistically significant strain relatedness between the Indian and the U.K. isolates and none of the isolates was clonally related. The study needs to be critically analysed in the light of the fact that it has been funded and sponsored by the industry which markets an antibiotic used for the treatment of infections caused by organisms which are multi-drug resistant,” noted the release issued by the group.