JIST

Prevailing Toxicology status in India versus Twenty-first Century Toxicology

Unlike many other developing Asian countries, India lags behind and yet to match the standards of Twenty-first century-toxicology. The primary factor for this is not the lack of qualified experts or resources of toxicology but the sheer motive. The benefits of toxicology in disposing day to day medical and medicolegal issues are subjugated by the political apathy or lack of concern by the bureaucratic stakeholders. Nevertheless, ‘we’ the experts from the toxicology specialty are responsible to a reasonable extent of not acting with adequate interest and vigour, and upgrading the standards of Toxicology par with the world standards. We should get rid of the habits of aberrant adjustments or compromises often made towards the cutting-down of resources (often deliberately) for establishing modern toxicology laboratory. And, this is evident from the National level medico-legal issue of 2014, i.e. Sunanda Pushkar suspected murder case where the system had to depend on the foreign toxicology set up.

It is apparent that the current year will be, in many senses, a landmark year for the Indian Toxicology fraternity. This can be visualised by concurrent effects of ongoing judicial reforms and financial austerity challenging the delivery of efficient, independent medico-legal services to the stakeholders. Gradually, the law-makers and law-enforcers of India started realising the requirement of indigenous modern toxicology set-up, at least after Sunanda Pushkar case. Therefore, I am expecting that our fraternity will gear up their research activities by further widening its dimension and project their research works to an international audience by publishing through JIST.

This Journal, our Journal, will do its utmost to play its part in maintaining the highest standards of scientific enquiry and debate, within an equally ethical framework. JIST follows strict protocol for publishing research papers as per the guidelines of ICMJE. JIST reiterates the fact; we never discriminate papers from IST and Non-IST members, or papers from Forensic Medicine to those from Non-Forensic specialty. We never solicit pay-and-publish and undue recommendations for accepting papers; rather an inclusive approach to consider the research articles form all fields of Toxicology (both medical and non-medical fields). That’s the reason JIST could be able to be indexed in prestigious CAB-abstracts. Moreover, strict double blinded peer-review process is followed for each article. Besides, JIST is committed to support the novice researchers who really have interest in this field in terms of making a scientific, valid and flawless manuscript to exactly reflect ideas of researcher in his manuscript. We always encourage papers having unique and latest information in this subject.

We look forward with great expectations from all of you, being a part of your JIST Editorial team.