My Agenda at BlogCamp 2006

Assuming my registration gets sorted out, I am going to spend the weekend with a vast array of India's top bloggers here in Chennai at BlogCamp 2006. I'm not sure how I first heard about the event, but about a month ago I attended one of the organizational meetings and then got swamped in other work and haven't peeked at the site to see how it has come along. It looks like the organizing team has done a great job and from Sept 9th -10th over 200 bloggers will descend on Tidal Park to discuss some of the hottest issues of the day. Topics include Blogging and Governance, Blogging and Entrepreneurship, Corporate Blogging, Getting Geeky, Blogging in New Media and Blogging and Community.

My aim, however, is to try to enlist some bloggers to help me out on an important story that has run into a dead end. I need an outcry from the local community to get anywhere with it. If you have been reading my blog you might remember a story about a one-eyed baby that was born at Kasturba Gandhi Hospital in late July. A report by the hospital said that the mother went to a fertility clinic after being childless for six years. The report also said that one possible cause for the defect was that she had taken an experimental anti-cancer drug called Cyclopamine sometime during her pregnancy.

In what can only be described as gross negligence, the hospital never asked the mother what drug the fertility clinic had prescribed her, or what clinic she attended. The absence of that information means it is impossible to rule out that there could be an illegal clinical trial going on here in Chennai that may be hurting innocent women.

In the conference I hope to get a few people interested in following up this story and get the hospital to correct the error.

Last week the child died in the hospital. Superintendent Dhanalakshmi told me that she would get the information about the clinic to me if and when the child died, but she has not done so to date. I will have to stop by the hospital this evening to talk to her again.

There I go, off topic again. See you at BlogCamp.