India faces the challenge of inappropriate use of antibiotics while Bharat copes with poor access to treatment, resulting in a policy conundrum and inaction. India was recently in the news for the wrong reasons. The serious threat posed by the newly discovered microbe, NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo--lactamase-1), resistant to many antibiotics, triggered alarm and panic. Predictions that the country will not meet the millennium development goal for child mortality caused dismay....

A leading Indian biochemist has urged the environment and forests ministry to lift the moratorium on Bt brinjal, the country's first genetically modified (GM) food crop developed using a technology supplied by the US multinational seed giant Monsanto. 'The moratorium is not affecting the multinational companies but India's own scientists who are ready with more than a dozen GM crops, including (Vitamin-A rich) golden rice,' said Govindarajan Padmanabhan at the Indian...

The editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, has said naming a superbug after New Delhi was an “error”, and has apologised. Some Europeans returning from South Asia had been found infected with a bacteria carrying a drug-resistant gene last year, which had been named New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase, or NDM-1, as the first patient had flown from Delhi to Sweden with the infection. While acknowledging this was a mistake, Horton said, “the science...

After creating a huge controversy by claiming that foreign patients who were treated in India developed antibiotic resistance, authors of the superbug New Delhi metallo-B-lactamase-1 (NDM-1) bacteria study published in the United Kingdom-based medical journal The Lancet now say that poor sanitation and unregulated antibiotic use presented an immense challenge and should be of great concern to the Indian health authorities and the World Health Organisation. Responding to queries in the...

The ability of illness-causing germs to resist drugs has become a challenge to efforts against infectious diseases, the United Nations health agency said today, urging countries to implement infection control measures to limit the spread of multi-drug resistant strains of micro-organisms. “Some bacteria have developed mechanisms which render them resistant to many of the antibiotics normally used for their treatment, so pose particular difficulties, as there may be few or no...