Wed 28 Jun 2006
It’s like getting the opportunity to win a medal in the olympics or play in a winning team in the world cup soccer.
It is about publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine. Everybody, somehow involved in medical science have the same dream, the dream of publishing in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The New England Journal of Medicine is worlds oldest ( established in 1812), largest and arguably, the best known medical journal. Every issue of NEJM, immediately after publication, gets intensely scanned by major news outlets like CNN, NY Times, Public radio, BBC, Reuter etc for the health news of the months.
While less than 1% all the academic physicians, scientist in USA, Europe, Australia, Japan, Israel and other developed countries could fulfil the dream of publishing in NEJM, a bunch of Bangladeshi scientists, who live and work in Dhaka, did it last week. A landmark research was performed in ICDDR,B, Dhaka and the results were published in NEJM.
Single-Dose Azithromycin for the Treatment of Cholera in Adults
Debasish Saha, M.B., B.S., Mohammad M. Karim, M.B., B.S., Wasif A. Khan, M.B., B.S., Sabeena Ahmed, M.Sc., Mohammed A. Salam, M.B., B.S., and Michael L. Bennish, M.D.
From the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Dhaka, Bangladesh (D.S., M.M.K., W.A.K., S.A., M.A.S.); the School of Family Medicine and Public Health, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa (M.L.B.); and the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom (M.L.B.).
If you are in search of some Bangladeshi heros, here are some. May be our Bangladeshi media don’t even know what is NEJM, and what a real landmark research mean, these people are the one who Bangladesh people should celebrate, not the Brazilian or Argentine soccer players.
June 29th, 2006 at 1:47 pm
A very great Hattip to Rumi for catching this one. I will post it to all contacts. As my academic friends point out to me the very dearth of scholastic articles from Bangladesh in academia this will serve as an inspiration for other budding scolars
June 30th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
This is a great news indeed.
However as a “news” it is not as popular as the world cup or any political news:). That might be one reason.
Wondering ICDDRB could have sent it to the newspapers as well.
July 5th, 2006 at 4:25 am
Publication in NEJM is certainly a significant achievement. But the important question is what is the signifcance of what is being reported? “Single-dose azithromycin was effective in the treatment of severe cholera in adults. The lack of efficacy of ciprofloxacin may result from its diminished activity against V. cholerae O1 strains currently circulating in Bangladesh.” This is not necessarily represent a significant advance in medicine in the long term. It may however be significant as a warning against over-use or unregulated use of antibiotics.