Scandal

Kickbacks from kidneys: Amritsar is in the eye of a storm. A huge racket involving billions of rupees has just been exposed there. Since 1995, 2384 kidney transplants have taken place in Punjab of which 1972 were in Amritsar. Of these 1522 were in the Kakkar hospital. According to the Transplantation of human organs Act 1994, donors of organs have to be either close relatives or if they are unrelated, it has to be out of affection for the patient with no monetary transactions. Apparently more than 1.5 billion rupees have exchanged hands since 1997; the lion's share going to middlemen and doctors. The donors who were mainly poor migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were given a paltry 25000 to 50000 and did not receive the best therapy post operatively. Six donors even died. The police have arrested the transplant surgeon of Kakkar Hospital, Dr. Sareen and Dr. O.P. Mahajan, Principal of the Government Medical College and chairman of the authorization committee that certified that no commercial transaction has taken place (eBMJ 25 January 2003).

Vaccination watch

Polio plus: a world minus polio: Doing things right the first time. Management gurus harp on the long-term gains of this simple policy. When most of the world has been cleared of polio, and India was also reporting a mere 268 cases in 2001, the lack of final drive and determination saw polio cases shoot up to 1556 in 2002 accounting for 85% of cases round the world. Most in UP and some in Gujarat and West Bengal. Who is to blame? The apathetic local government? The culture of false reporting of immunization coverage or the inherent lackadaisical attitude of Indians? The just concluded pulse polio program in January and February is attempting to cover some 165 million under fives now. Are we too late? We just have to keep our fingers crossed and wait (eBMJ 15 February 2003).

Journal Watch

Literally free: The utopian world where knowledge is free, might just transform into concrete reality. A move is on to allow free access to original articles published online. This will remove the need for subscriptions to online journals. This will be possible if authors of original articles are made to pay for the cost of online publications. Many big studies sponsored by funding agencies like National Institute of Health in the US or the Wellcome Trust in UK are willing to foot the bill as it will be a miniscule fraction of the cost of research. This plan is being mooted by PubMed Central, which is also urging journals to allow it access to their back articles free in exchange for scanning their archives and maintaining digital records. However, paper editions of the journals and value additions such as editorials and commentaries will still be charged (eBMJ 25 January 2003).

Technology

Muscling in: French scientists recently reported a remarkable success of an experimental intervention. They showed that stem cells injected into injured hearts transform into functional units. They took myoblasts from the thigh of a 71-year-old man with a myocardial infarction and injected it into his heart. He demonstrated clinical improvement. But when he died 18 months later, the post mortem analysis showed that though they had injected skeletal muscle, the muscle had an excess of slow myosin over fast myosin which is seen typically in cardiac muscle. Now an international trial with 300 patients is planned to see effectiveness and long term prognosis with stem cell transplants (New Scientist 7 February 2003).

Gouri Rao Passi,
Department of Pediatrics,
Choithram Hospital & Research Center,
Indore 452001.
Email: [email protected]