THIS is apropos of the 'superbug' stories that have been appearing in Dawn, as well as in the media across the world, during the past few weeks. The most immediate and likely threat posed by this media coverage is to the fast growing medical tourism in South Asia. That is, if there was no effective response by the countries of South Asia, and India in particular, which are experiencing a medical tourism boom, with new five-star hospitals offering everything from facelifts to fertility treatments and open-heart surgery at half the price of western Europe.

These superbug stories are based on a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, which declared that health tourists flocking to South Asia (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) had carried a new class of antibiotic-resistant superbug to Britain, and warned that it could spread worldwide.

While the Indian medical community and politicians have reacted angrily to the study, the Pakistani medical community is silent over it so far. In India, The Lancet study was discussed even in the parliament with some angry MPs denouncing it as a plot by global pharmaceutical firms.

Whatever the outcome of this new episode apparently aimed at scare mongering, questions must be asked about the role played by the international medical establishment dominated by pharmaceutical interests and global health agencies like the World Health Organisation. Memories are still fresh with the fallacy of threat of a global endemic of swine flu created by the collusion between WHO and big pharmaceutical companies. Much has already been written about the details of the fallacy of this endemic, which never was, that resulted in a profit of $7-$10 billion to vaccine manufacturers.

While this new wave of politics in healthcare industry started by The Lancet study is likely to go on for a long time, at least in India, the fact of the matter remains that this is yet another reminder to all concerned, most importantly the consumers of the healthcare services, that the misuse and abuse of antibiotics cannot go on any longer.

Irrational use of antibiotics over the past millennium has indeed made existence of such superbugs a stark reality.

The only way to avoid imminent return to an era of healthcare where there were no modern cures for infectious diseases is to start implementing effective programmes of infection control and rational antibiotic use at all levels — public policy, healthcare providers, public and private health institutions and citizen consumers.

AYYAZ KIANI
Islamabad