Open Source Journalism and the One Eyed Baby

I just got back from giving a short talk at blogcamp about the one eyed child born here in Chennai. I am hoping that the blogging community will be able to move this story ahead where I have run into a dead end. Here is what I know and I have a few suggestions on how to move the story forward

The Facts:
The baby girl was born at Kasturba Gandhi Hospital by a woman named Gomathi on or about July 31st 2006. The child had a single eye in the center of her forehead and severe brain damage. She died early last week, but the hospital has not released a cause of death.

An internal hospital report mentioned Cyclopamine, an experimental anti-cancer drug, as a possible cause for the child's condition. A hospital nurse in the ward said that the mother was taking "tablets" to get pregnant because she had been childless for 6 years. The superintendent, Dr. TMT Dhanalakshmi also said that the mother had gone to a fertility clinic, but that the attendant doctors did not take a complete medical history and failed to ask her what drugs the mother had been on, or the name and address of the fertility clinic. It is possible that a drug that the mother was taking helped cause, or bring to term, the baby's condition. While there is no firm evidence that cyclopamine was involved in the child's condition, there are precidents of anti-cancer medications being prescribed as fertility treatments in clinical trials in India as in the case of Letrozole in 2003.

Cyclopamine is a publicly available compound that can be bought from numerous sources in the United States and can be sent to India. One doctor who e-mailed me after the article in Wired News came out said that he had conducted an independent theraputic trial of cyclopamine on a human patient in the United States.

The hospital was not doing its job when it failed to take a medical history, so we need to take up where they left off.

What Next:
To carry this story forward we need to located the fertility clinic in question and determine what drugs the mother was prescribed. We do not want to berate the mother with questions, since she has obviously been through a very traumatic ordeal and do not want to post photos of her all over the internet, but we may need to contact her in order to locate the clinic since the hospital has failed to cooperate. To find her we must locate the child's birth or death certificate and follow the address listed there to the parent's residence. The certificates could be obtained through the RTI act, by connections at the hospital, in the government or any other source for public records.

This is an experiment in Open Source Journalism. I hope that bloggers and activists will be able to crack this case so that we can either say for sure that there was no foul play, and that this was a genetic accident, or hold people accountable for what could be a crime.

Please keep me informed on what you discover, but feel free to blog about your findings and publish in any medium you are comfortale with. Also, members of blog camp have begun to include a tecnoratti tag for "chennaioneeyedbaby" in their posts so we can track this story as it develops.

God speed.

Tags: chennaioneeyedbaby, cyclopamine, blogcamp