Apollo Hospitals Chairman Prathap C. Reddy has said that an intra-hospital committee will be going into the issue of the NDM-1 bug and will submit a report to the medical director soon.
Speaking to media persons on Friday, Dr. Reddy said, “We are not sleeping over the issue. Specialists are at it already.” He said this in response to a question from journalists about the involvement of microbiologists from two Apollo Hospitals - Hospital, Kolkata, and Apollo Hospitals, Chennai – as co-authors in the Lancet study.
He went on to add that the hospital continues to monitor MRSA infections and share this information with partners and collaborating institutions. The data is part of Apollo's Clinical Excellence parameters. “But we have never faced what we are talking about now,” Dr. Reddy stated.
“It is atrocious to have named a bug over a country/city. Infections are every where,” he said in agreement with the views of the Indian Council for Medical Research chief V.M. Katoch. “We feel it is motivated to affect medical tourism in India, which is growing at a rapid rate. We have results on a par with some of the best health institutions in the world and have very strict quality control standards,” he added.
At the same time he urged the Central government to standardise hospitalisation procedures and to bring in Quality Control of India to monitor standards in hospitals. Doctors too, he concurred with some of the studies published after the Lancet study, would have to be continuously educated on antibiotic usage.
International experts from the United Kingdom, who were in Chennai to participate in Apollo's conference on bariatric surgery, also spoke on the implications of the Lancet study. Abeezar Sarela, senior lecturer in surgery, University of Leeds, said the Indian medical system was held in high regard in the U.K. “MRSA is a big issue in hospitals in the U.K. and infections are a concern the world over. We have to view this in that context.”
Torsten Olbers, senior consultant, Imperial College, London, added: “The problem is global management of the disease. The name is probably just to indicate origin. The good news here is that it is reversible if we reduce antibiotic toxicity in the general population.”
