India attacks resistant superbug study

India’s medical establishment has strongly criticised a study published in a leading UK medical journal that suggests Indian hospitals are the source of a new drug-resistant superbug that is spreading globally and that warns against travel to the subcontinent for medical treatments.

Health officials called the findings published in The Lancet “unscientific” and “economically motivated”, taking particular umbrage at the naming of the gene found to have made bacteria resistant to antibiotics as New Delhi metallo-beta lactamese, or NDM-1.

“Drug resistance is all around the world. To try to . . . make a web around this whole story and say the consequence is that ‘people should not come to India’ smacks of a larger interest somewhere,” said Dr Naresh Trehan, chairman and managing director of Medanta, a 1,250-bed hospital outside New Delhi.

Dr Raman Sardana, secretary of the National Hospital Infection Society of India, asserted that the Lancet study’s design was faulty and did not prove where the bug originated. “We feel this is economically motivated,” he said.

The study said the drug-resistant bacteria were found in patients in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and some UK residents who had been treated in Indian hospitals.

The authors warned that India’s growing medical tourism business could be a conduit for the superbug’s global spread.

“It is disturbing . . . to read calls in the popular press for UK patients to opt for corrective surgery in India with the aim of saving the [National Health Service] money,” the study said. “Such a proposal might ultimately cost the NHS substantially more than the short-term saving.”

But the Indian health ministry said the inference that the superbug originated in the country was “not supported by scientific data”. It accused the researchers of conflicts of interest, citing funding from the European Union, the Wellcome Trust and Wyeth. The researchers have said that they had no conflict of interest.

Professor Tim Walsh from Cardiff University, the lead researcher on the study, said he was “disappointed” by reports of intimidation against several of his India-based co-authors. He stressed that the Wellcome Trust was a charity and that just 2 per cent of support – a travel grant – came from Wyeth, while a key antibiotic that could kill the superbug had long been off patent.

India’s upmarket private hospital chains – including Apollo Hospitals, Fortis Healthcare and Medanta – have been attracting a growing number of European and US patients seeking treatment at a lower cost, or faster, than at home.

The Confederation of Indian Industry has forecast that India's medical tourism business could generate annual revenues of $2.4bn by 2012.