02 September,2010 08:07 AM IST | | Amit Kumar
Ministry of health issues notices to scientists for not taking necessary clearances
After registering vociferous protest against naming a superbug after New Delhi, government of India has taken those who made the discovery to task.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has issued notices to all Indian researchers involved in the study asking them to explain whether they had followed the rules, regulations and guidelines while conducting such a study including transfer/export of the biological materials to another country.
The study was published by leading medical journal Lancet.
"For transfer of human/biological materials to other countries for the purpose of clinical research, specific permission is required to be obtained from the designated authority under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The doctors, who have been issued notices, will have to reply that whether they took the permission from the ministry," said a health ministry official.
"It is compulsory to take the permission from the ministry for conducting any research work with the assistance of any other country. I don't remember that anyone has taken any permission from the ministry," said Dr VM Katoch, Secretary, Department of Health Research (DHR), who is also Director General, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).
According to health ministry sources, the ministry has issued notices to seven Indian doctors who were part of the study. The doctors have been asked to explain their research. If the Indian isolates from Chennai and Haryana were reported to be analysed in UK, then what were the circumstances that led to the naming of the bacteria after the capital city of the country, the notice said.
Though no time frame has been given to file the reply, the doctors have been asked to respond to the government's explanation notice as early as possible.
Many doctors in the capital are miffed at the report, especially with the nomenclature of the superbug - New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1), which they believe is inappropriate as the bug was isolated from Chennai and Haryana.
In the study, the lead author of the paper, Karthikeyan K Kumarasamy of the Department of Microbiology at the Dr ALM Post Graduate Institute of Basic Medical Sciences (PGIBMS), University of Madras, had interpreted that new antibiotic resistance mechanism spread possibly from India and said that it was unsafe to travel to India for treatment because they believe that resistance genes/organism which the journal named as New Delhi metallo beta lactamase (NDM-1) possibly originated in India.
Bug dissected
The British researchers warned that an enzyme, called New Delhi metallo- -lactamase-1, or NDM-1, allows bacteria to be highly resistant to almost all antibiotics. NDM-1 is an enzyme that can live inside different bacteria and any bacteria which carries it is resistant to carbapenem antibiotics, one of the most powerful antibiotics.
The superbug was found in about 50 patients in the UK, of whom around 37 had travelled to India or Pakistan for medical procedures including cosmetic surgery, according to the study in the journal Lancet.
The suberbug is mostly found in E Coli, a common cause of urinary tract infections and pneumonia, which is highly resistant to antibiotics.
The enzyme can easily be copied and transferred between different bacteria.Indian medical tourism might come under scanner of the health authorities worldwide after the warning by the British scientists.
