Call it a baby step towards happiness of a lifetime.
Childless couples from Kolhan region will no longer have to seek infertility treatments in other cities and towns. An IVF clinic is all set to debut in steel city Jamshedpur from November 19.
Jamshedpur Fertility and Endoscopy Centre, which had been operational in Golmuri since 2012 and offered options like intrauterine insemination (IUI), will now boast Sparsh IVF Centre on the same premises. For test tube babies, Sparsh will provide advanced investigations and treatment such as self-IVF with facilities for donor eggs, donor embryo and donor sperms.
A test tube baby is the term that refers to a child that is conceived outside the body. The process is referred to as "in vitro" fertilisation. Simply put, eggs are removed from the mother's ovary and incubated with sperm from the father.
"Childless couples go to Ranchi, Dhanbad or Bokaro for IVF. They spend a lot of money on travel and stay while treatment costs are no less than Rs 1.5 lakh. Now, we are bringing the facility to them. Treatment costs won't exceed Rs 1 lakh," said Dr Binod S. Agarwal, director of the fertility clinic.
Agarwal claimed his centre's huge achievement in terms of intrauterine insemination. "We boast an IUI success rate of 74.7 per cent, which is more than clinics in Ranchi, Dhanbad and Bokaro. Many couples who had given up hope have been gifted the joy of parenthood at our existing clinic," he said, adding that people from neighbouring districts as well as Odisha and Bengal came to Jamshedpur for infertility treatments.
The upcoming centre will also offer EmbryoScope, a time-lapse incubator that provides a stable incubation environment while high-quality images of embryo development are acquired. "Couples can watch a video of the entire fertilisation process. It will be the first-of-its-kind facility in the state. We shall also have a counsellor," Agarwal said.
The doctor, who was in the news in 2010 for laparoscopic removal of two large ovarian tumours from the same ovary of a young patient while preserving the normal nature of tissues, said infertility was on the rise in industrial cities.
"Research nails stress and toxic environment as major causes of infertility. We hope to address this concern here," he summed it up.
