Assam bans pig doc’s clinical trials

Dr Dhaniram Baruah, the controversial cardiac surgeon who had hit headlines by transplanting a pig’s heart to a human body, has been barred by the Assam Government from carrying out any clinical trials on patients till his claims were cleared by “appropriate authorities” in the Government of India. Stating this in the Assam Assembly on Thursday, Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sharma said the Government, which had noticed his claims of curing patients of various kinds of ailments in the past few months, has asked him to provide his findings so that those could be verified by the appropriate authorities. “The Government will also ask him to prove his claims before the scientific community,” he said. The issue figured in the Zero Hour when Ananta Deka (CPI-M) raised the matter on the basis of a newspaper report in which an eminent cardiologist had demanded an inquiry into the pig-heart doctor’s claims.