Jinnah doctor accuses colleague of plagiarism

Jinnah Hospital senior registrar accused of plagiarising colleague's research on dengue outbreak.

LAHORE: A Jinnah Hospital doctor has accused her colleague of plagiarising her research work on dengue outbreak in the province in 2008 and getting it published in an international journal without attributing it to her.

Dr Fouzia Tahir Ali Javeed, the in charge of Jinnah Hospital Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) laboratory, last week lodged a complaint with Fawad Hassan Fawad, the health secretary, against Dr Asif Humayun, Jinnah Hospital senior registrar.

She accused Dr Humayun of using her research work without mentioning her. She appealed the health secretary to order her colleague appropriately credit her for the article. The health secretary has ordered an inquiry into the matter.

Dr Fouzia, an assistant professor at Allama Iqbal Medical College, told The Express Tribune that she conducted the first-ever research on 17 dengue patients in Pakistan at the PCR laboratory in 2008.

She said she diagnosed four serotypes of dengue: DEN1, DEN2, DEN3 and DEN 4. She said that in view of her research findings she suggested various precautionary measures to the government during the 2009 dengue fever outbreak. These measures, she said, helped contain the number of dengue patients to less than 50 in 2009.

The number of people diagnosed with dengue was in excess of 1,400 in 2008.

Dr Humayun rejected the allegations.

He said his article Multiple Dengue Serotypes and High Frequency of Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever during 2008, Dengue Virus Outbreak in Punjab was published in 2009 edition of the US-based International Journal of Infectious Diseases.

He said that an inquiry team at the journal cleared him of plagiarism charges filed by Dr Fouzia.

He added that another inquiry launched by the AIMC professors had found no veracity in her allegations. He hoped that the health secretary’s probe would also declare him innocent.

Dr Humayun, currently in charge of Dengue, HIV and AIDS research at Jinnah Hospital, said Dr Fouzia’s study was based on 17 patients while his work dealt with 485 patients of whom only 110 fulfilled the criteria and were included in the final article. He said that Dr Fouzia had sent her article to a Saudi journal but it was not published.

He said that the objective of his study was to better understand the clinical pattern of people diagnosed for dengue viral infection during the 2008 outbreak in Lahore and the severity of disease.

Dr Humayun said that he used standardised data collection sheets to collect data from two tertiary-care hospitals from September 2008 up to December 2008.

He said that out of the 110 dengue patients, 70 were male and 40 were female.

He said that the most common symptoms included fever (100%), myalgia (68.2%), headache (55.5%), nausea (39.1%), skin rash (53.6%), mucocutaneous hemorrhagic manifestations (58.2%), and ocular pain (20%).

He said that during his research 41.8 per cent patients were tested positive for classic dengue fever (DF), 56.4 per cent for dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) and 1.8 per cent for dengue shock syndrome (DSS).

The mean duration of fever was six days. The majority of the patients recovered completely without complications.

He said that the high frequency of DHF and the presence of three different dengue serotypes during 2008 outbreak highlighted the importance of preventive measures.

He added that physicians should be educated about how to identify patients at high risk of developing the DHF and DSS.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 21^st, 2010.