WASHINGTON: With India grappling with swine flu, a prominent Indian-American doctor said the time has come for the country’s government to speed up the process of training its doctors in infectious diseases or it may be too late to bring the situation under control.
As a country of more than a billion people, India is literally sitting on a ticking time bomb of infectious diseases, and it is very depressing that the Indian government and health officials, despite being aware of this fact, are unwilling to speed up the process in this regard, said Dr. Naveen Shah, co-founder and former president of the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI).
Dr Shah says he has been campaigning unsuccessfully in New Delhi for the past three years to push India to train its doctors in infectious diseases (ID).
“India has more than 50 million infectious disease patients and they don’t have a single specialist. In comparison, the US, where the death rate due to ID is negligible, has about 6,000 ID specialists,” Shah, who hails from the city of Pune, told PTI.
A billion-dollar country needs at least 15,000 ID specialists.
Dr. Shah, a urologist from Maryland, says there is no one in New Delhi willing to accept his offer to train at least one Indian doctor in the United States in infectious diseases for free.
