THE Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on Friday slammed the report that claimed a drug-resistant superbug was traced back to India, terming it as "alarmist".

Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare Ghulam Nabi Azad said it was unfair to say that the so-called "superbug NDM-1" was found only in India and Pakistan.

"It's universal and is found in the intestines of humans and animals. It's wrong to say that it's found only in India and Pakistan. They say it's found in patients who visit India and Pakistan. It was nowhere mentioned if the bacteria were there even before those persons visited India," he told reporters outside Parliament.

The Health Ministry, which was ascertaining the motives behind the study, also took strong exception to the last sentence of the report. "Concluding sentence presents a frightening picture which is not supported by any scientific data," said an official.

Minister of State for Health Dinesh Trivedi strongly objected to the naming of the "superbug" after New Delhi. "It's like HIV. As far as my information is, the first patient of HIV was in America. Can we say it originated in America? So, instead of HIV, can we say 'America NMD' or something like that?" he wondered aloud.

"Karthikeyan Kumaraswamy, one of the co-authors, has denied and disassociated himself from the report. We have to find if there's some ulterior motive of some pharmaceutical industry," he told reporters.

Karthikeyan also dismissed as hypothetical this conclusion and said the alarmist interpretations were made without his knowledge. He said there was nothing to fear about the bacteria. "Without my knowledge some of the interpretations were written in the report," said the 32-year-old research scholar of AL Mudaliar Post-Graduate Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Madras.Karthikeyan co-authored with Timothy Walsh the research article published in the Lancet.