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This post was in draft format on my blog for a couple of weeks till I actually chatted (over IRC) with Scott Carney who broke this story, at the Chennai BlogCamp early this morning and I decided to finally update the draft and post it now!

Tessa Quayle was murdered on a visit to remote Lake Turkana in Kenya. She was killed because she had gotten too close to a secret – one that involved a nefarious multinational drug company, a tuberculosis remedy with unfortunate fatal side effects and a cover-up involving the higher echelons of the British foreign office.

That of course, as some of you would have surely known, was one of the main elements of the plot created by John Le Carre for his book – The Constant Gardener. The celluloid adaptation of this book was one of the better movies to come out of Hollywood last year, but a real life version seems appears to be brewing right in Chennai. Sadly though, the said events have barely created a ripple, a Wired magazine feature and mentions on Boing Boing and Desipundit not withstanding.

It all started on July 30/August 1 when various MSM sources reported that an abnormal baby with just one eye on its forehead had been born in a Chennai government hospital. This caught the attention of an American freelance journalist, Scott Carney, who blogged about it on the 5th of August. while hinting that excessive pollution might be the cause, Scott likened the abnormality to a similar incident in the state of New York.

His post was picked up by Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, on the same day. Later a Boing Boing reader pitched in with a few - related - links that were helpful in understanding the scientific background of such an abnormality. Two days later Scott himself added that he might get to see the baby personally and would post more information.

On the 8th of August, Scott did visit the child and found that the condition did not seem to be hereditary and that the baby had lived longer than any other baby with similar deformities. And on the 10th of August, Scott’s feature on the baby made it to the Wired magazine’s online edition and that is where this story takes a new turn straight out of Le Carre’s book.

On his Wire News report, Scott wrote that this baby’s condition might be a result of either a previously undetected chromosomal defect. Or it could be the result of a clinical trial gone awry. According an internal report that Scott saw at the Kasturba Children’s Hospital where the baby was born but was not allowed to copy/reproduce in full, the baby’s parents turned to a (as yet) unnamed fertility clinic after 6 years of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant. And at some point during this treatment, Cyclopamine, an experimental cancer drug came into the picture. When, how, why - nothing is known.

While it is true that I am the same person who views the loss of the “original” tapes of the first moon landing as a convenient last act of what has since become the biggest lie that NASA perpetuated on the poor Kremlin top-brass, my disbelief here is not without reason. Scott says that while he has seen the report, he has not been able to get a copy of it. His repeated requests, to meet with the author of the report have not been acceded to and get this – He has been denied access to the baby’s mother.

The doctor who heads the hospital adds that the woman had never been to a hospital before and that “she was in such a confused state that she couldn’t remember what clinic she had gone to or what medication they had prescribed”. The mother has also been discharged even before her complete medical history had been documented. I wonder what happened to the father.

So there you have it - A deformed infant (link not for the faint at heart), a confused mother, a drug that may or may not have caused the deformity, a damning report that is practically anonymous, a blogger breaking the whole story and worst of all, no mainstream media coverage from India, apart from a few “one eyed baby born in Chennai” references!

Even though Scott Carney’s initial post got mentions on both Desipundit and Boing Boing, the 47 comments on it are almost solely from the people pointed there by Xeni Jardin’s post. What are we, as desis, doing? I understand that not everyone who reads comments, but the numbers are too glaring.

Scott said then,

She moves about and cries just like any other newborn infant. Her head is a little smaller than normal. While the first time you see a photo of her you may feel a little revolted, please try to remember that she is a person, too.

But this morning, Scott gave me some sad news. The baby has since died. She had lived longer than any other baby with a similar condition. But she was a person too. Let’s not forget that. I hope this post will make more people sit up and take notice of the child who might not have had the mathematical probability of living longer than the month or so when she was breathing.

Pass this message along and let more people know about this tiny human being who needed all our attention then, not because she did not look normal, but because another like her could be avoided. And if an illegal clinical trial is involved, it is time the perpetuators are brought to justice.

In his quest to find out what really happened, Scott seems to have run into a dead end, by his own words. As I mentioned on the top of this post, I was chatting with Scott in the Blogcamp IRC channel and the topic of his presentation was open source blogging. He hopes that

bloggers and activists will be able to crack this case so that we can either say for sure that there was no foul play, and that this was a genetic accident, or hold people accountable for what could be a crime.

But is this possible? Maybe it is. And this post is a start from my side. Who else is going to take this up?

(Cross posted on Desicritics.)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 5:27 am and is filed under Chennaioneeyedbaby, India, Life, cyclopamine.