Twenty-two patients in three months in a single hospital. This statistic should serve as an answer to anyone who wants to understand why the NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase-1) is creating ripples — both within India and in the rest of the world.
Hinduja Hospital in Mahim isolated the super bacteria in 22 patients within a span of three months. This has happened within a year of the bacteria being isolated for the first time by European doctors in a Swedish patient who had travelled to New Delhi for an operation.
“If a single hospital can isolate such a significant number of bacteria with a new resistance gene in a short period of time; the data from all the Indian hospitals, if available would potentially be more interesting and shocking than the human genome project data, which is considered as a discovery more important than the moon landing itself,” wrote Dr Abdul Ghafar K, consultant in infectious diseases at Apollo Hospital, Chennai, in an editorial in JAPI, one of the leading Indian research journals.
A senior microbiologist from Mumbai who doesn’t want to be named believes that mutations in bugs — to create superbugs — can only occur in countries like India where antibiotics are routinely overused or abused.
But Dr Abhay Chaudhary, president of the Indian Association of Medical Microbiologists believes that the European conclusion that it originated from the Indian subcontinent is not substantiated. “Some of the extrapolations in the study which appeared in the study that appeared in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal are inappropriate,” he said.
While the truth about NDM-1’s origins remain debatable, there are few things most Indian doctors agree upon: widespread abuse and overuse of antibiotics and the subsequent resistance in the community. In his JAPI article in March, Dr Ghafur wrote, “Our country, India, is the world leader in antibiotic resistance; in no other country antibiotics been misused to such an extent.”
Times of india