Response to the Letter to the Editor
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LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Response to the Letter to the Editor Suchismita Das 1 Received: 10 September 2020 / Accepted: 28 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Dear Editor, Reference: ESPR-D-19-02994: Assessment of lead and cadmium in fifty-four Indian herbal medicine: Tribal and marketed varieties and ESPR-D-20-04988: Lead and Cadmium assessment in 54 Indian Herbal Medicine: Traditional and Marketed varieties - a Questionable allegation! This is in connection to queries raised by Swathy et al. We are very much serious about our work and open to queries about the same. Our work on herbal medicines (HM) has raised some questions in the minds, and we appreciate that. HM are an integral part of every Indian household, often they become ‘over the counter’ cure for many everyday maladies. But there is a general lack of awareness in many people regarding correct usage/application or tentative side effects if incorrectly or overused. Our study was a monitoring effort on available HM sold in local markets of the Silchar town of Assam in India. We vehemently protest their statement that we made ‘a generalized faulty statement/hypothesis that the majority of the Indian herbal medicine contains heavy metal and is hazardous to health’. There are thousands of Indian herbal medicines, and our testing of 54 samples is in no way making a generalized statement/hypothesis that the majority of the herbal medicine contains heavy metal and is hazardous to health. That is an error of understanding on their part. We included the word ‘fifty-four’ in our title for avoiding this, which in itself stated our intention clearly. We repeatedly mentioned that ~ 12% of our sampled marketed HM varieties and none of the tribal medicine had Pb above permissible limits. Also, ~ 17% of the tribal varieties had Cd above allowable limits. In fact, in conclusion, we categorically advocated using Indian HM when collected from pristine sites (such as the ones used/ Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Suchismita Das [email protected] 1
Life Science and Bioinformatics, Assam University, Silchar, India
prepared by the tribes), also pointing towards the fact that products might be contaminated during any stage (manufacture to packaging to marketing, etc.). Since both Pb and Cd are somewhat of ubiquitous in nature, their presence was not unwarranted in HMs. Also, the toxic manifestations of a trace element are not only influenced by its nature, route of entry, dosage, persistence, pharmacokinetics, dynamics, bioavailability, and bio-transformations but also by the age, gender, nutritional status, disease state, and physiology of the person exposed to it. Therefore, even if some compounds are consumed for long may not cause an adverse impact in some people, at times, some others might. Our risk assessment model was based on presumption as per US EPA (1999), which used predictive estimation of dose and response, which is a standard practice, especially when data in humans are not available. Regarding the specific c
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