US specialist to address swine flu in India

The swine flu epidemic now sweeping India should give the government and the Medical Council of India the needed impetus to move rapidly on an initiative to train doctors in the treatment of infectious diseases, Dr Navin Shah has said.

Shah, a founder-member of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin, originally hails from Pune, in Maharashtra, where India's first swine flu death was recorded. Last year, his sustained campaign for such intensive training initiatives had fructified when Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's office green-lighted a training program in infectious diseases, which account for nearly 48 per cent of all deaths in the country.

"The first batch was to start in 2010, but we should take this swine flu pandemic in India as an opportunity to canvass for infectious diseases specialists all over India," Shah said, pointing out that India has over 50 million ID patients and almost no trained specialists, whereas in the US there are over 5,600 specialists and almost no ID deaths.

"The unfortunate thing is that they (in India) don't think that specializing in infectious diseases is that important. But here in the US, once you get complications like the swine flu, infectious diseases specialists can manage it much better and save lives compared to a general practitioner or just an internal medicine physician."

One reason for the large number of deaths in India was that primary care physicians tended to misdiagnose patients at the early stage, when proper diagnosis could have resulted in a cure, Shah said, adding that this was likely the case with the ongoing swine flu epidemic as well. "The number of deaths could be more than is reported by the media, because news is being curtailed so as not to spread fear and panic among the people there," he said.

Thanks to his persistence, the prime minister's office had directed the National Board of Examinations and the Medical Council of India, both semi-government nodes controlling medical education and medical practice in India, to translate Shah's proposals into action and to envisage infectious disease as a sub-specialty in the graduate medical education curriculum in India.

Two of the best infectious disease specialists in the United States — Akshay Shah and Indira Brar — were to formulate a curriculum, which is expected to be finalized by the end of his month. The first batch of Indian graduate students was scheduled to enroll for this specialty in May 2010.

Akshay Shah told India Abroad that he, too, had been informed that "the swine flu outbreak has sent a wave of panic through much of India. This may turn out to be a bigger public issue in India compared to the US because of the many crowded areas, and with people travelling in crowded buses and trains."

Navin Shah is scheduled to leave for India next week to give the inaugural lecture on 'What's New in ID,' and said that in the wake of the swine flu epidemic, "I will have a special focus on this in Mumbai at our annual ID conference on September 6 at the Hinduja Hospital, which hopefully will be attended by physicians from all over India, particularly since I will be talking a lot about how to prevent and treat swine flu."

"I remain totally committed to volunteer my time and effort for establishing the ID specialty in India," he said. "And this commitment is even greater now because of the swine flu outbreak because I am very much aware what such a pandemic could do in a country like India and the adverse impact it could have."

Akshay Shah and Brar are slated to return to India later this year on two-week stints, during which they will begin to train doctors in key aspects of the speciality.