The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Patient offers himself for drug trial

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Dec 20, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Patient offers himself for drug trial

By Our Staff Reporter

GAJWEL (MEDAK DT.), DEC. 19. Twenty-eight-year-old M. Ravinder Reddy looks like a schoolboy and his spinal chord seldom helps him. He wishes to offer himself for drug testing. Ravinder is the youngest in the family of four and lives in Anajipur village of Doultabad mandal near Gajwel in Medak district. Ravinder is suffering from an unknown disease that made him weak and immobile.

Balalakshmi (32), his elder sister, died of the same problem in the early hours of Saturday after prolonged weakness and upper respiratory trouble. It all began when the brother and sister were studying in a school at Raipole, a nearby village. While the limbs became weak and dysfunctional, their vertebral column also started giving trouble.

Tests conducted

With no father and only mother left to fend for them they stopped going to school, but finished Intermediate as private candidates.

J.M.K. Murty of the Nizams Institute of Medical Sciences, who conducted several tests on Ravinder during 1993, confirmed that the trouble was with the spinal chord but none of the doctors could diagnose the disease that had taken the life of Balalakshmi and caused immobility to Ravinder.

Ravinder, who came to know about the death of Venkatesh due to muscular dystrophy, said: "I want to live, live for one more year, then I decide what to do with my organs."

Plea for help

His mother, who had sold all her land to save her children, is crestfallen with the death of her daughter.

She wants to save her only son as her elder son was murdered a decade ago in Hyderabad.

She needs medical advice, money for medicines and above all she needs compassion from officials who visited her family once but never turned back.

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