'Glamorous' diseases claim less lives but corner funds

India's largest killers, responsible for 20 per cent of all deaths, are respiratory diseases and infections. You would think they rank high in the research concerns of Indian scientists, right? Dead wrong. They come a dismal 24th in the list of medical research priorities. Cancer is responsible for only 0.1 per cent of all deaths. But cancer research is high profile, opens doors to western collaborations and is "trendy". It ranks No. 6 in the list of medical priorities.Something is wrong here. A new study has found that the attention India gives to the diseases which claim the most victims are not the diseases high on our scientists' list of priorities. The largest number of cases are those of acute respiratory diseases such as pneumonia, diarrhoeal diseases, communicable diseases like tuberculosis and leprosy, and infancy diseases, according to government records."We are certainly not focusing enough on these important medical problems," says S. Arunachalam, the author of the study and an information scientist at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai. Arunachalam's conclusions are based on a seven-year analysis of about 20,000 papers from a series of publications in the world's premier medical database Medline.Researchers, he says, seem to be more concerned with the so-called lifestyle diseases like heart ailments and cancer, where a good number of cases come from the middle and upper classes. What is especially worrying is that the ratio of medical spending to the population in India is one of the lowest in the world. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) spends a mere Rs 60 crore for medical research every year. With such low allocations, some diseases are "pampered", while others fall into the "deprived" category. "When multi drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis and kala azar are causing so much morbidity, it is most distressing that hardly any research is done on these diseases," says Dr M.S. Valiathan, vice-chancellor of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Karnataka. At the bottom of the problem is the acute shortage of funds.This is true of other major ailments too. India has a blind population of 10 million, the largest in the world. But ophthalmology is No. 19 in the list of research priorities. "We are still in the infancy of eye research in India. It needs a lot of support and collaboration," admits Dr G.N. Rao, head of the noted L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad. This is not to say that cancer, aids and cardio-vascular diseases can be ignored. Arunachalam's study, says Valiathan, underscores a serious problem: there just isn't enough research conducted to improve public health. Even in the priority areas, research work is plagued by "metooism", where most ideas are borrowed from the West.Some scientists, however, have questioned the validity of the study, which is an analysis of certain publications. "Much of India's good medical research is published in Indian journals and do not find mention in Medline; that is something we need to account for," says Dr V. Ramalingaswamy, professor emeritus at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences. .preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}There are problems of nomenclature which Arunachalam does not take into consideration. Tuberculosis, for instance, is sometimes classified under microbiology instead of respiratory diseases. All the same, the study is the first real audit of Indian medical research. It has also shown the lack of transparency in the funding system. "Nobody really knows how much is allocated to whom," complains Rao. "What we need is a high-profile group to look into medical rriorities."Scarcity of funds is unwittingly an indictment of the ICMR. Union Health Minister Renuka Chowdhury admits the Government is seized with the problems plaguing medical research and shortcomings are a result of a funds crunch and lopsided priorities. But there has been little effort to plug the loopholes. As Valiathan points out, "We treat western medicine like the latest car in the market: it comes into the country, we learn to drive it, then sit around waiting for the next hot model to come in." And a few thousands die while that happens.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 3, 1997--- ENDS ---

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'Glamorous' diseases claim less lives but corner funds

'Glamorous' diseases claim less lives but corner funds.

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