It’s official — India has 3.5 m HIV cases

NEW DELHI, NOV 9: A couple of months ago when U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told the U.N. General Assembly that India had 8.5 million...

NEW DELHI, NOV 9: A couple of months ago when U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan told the U.N. General Assembly that India had 8.5 million HIV/AIDS cases, he set alarm bells ringing. Not just in India but across the globe. Epidemiologists and public health agencies, who have been keeping track of the spread of the fatal disease which attacks the immune system and results in death, were clearly disturbed.

To put an end to all speculation, the National Aids Control Organisation, better known by its acronym NACO, the Union Health Ministry’s high-profile division

handling all matters relating to HIV/AIDS in India, has now come out with a definite figure. NACO today put the number of HIV/AIDS cases in the country at 3.5 million.

“This will set at rest the kind of wild guesses and speculation which had resulted in a highly distorted picture of AIDS in India,” NACO chief JVR Prasada Rao said. However, he cautioned that this too was a “working estimate” of the total number of people living with HIV and AIDS inIndia.

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Apart from the all-India figure, NACO also has the break-up of HIV/AIDS cases in the male and female population, the rural-urban divide and figures for every state and Union Territory in the country.

Maharashtra heads the list with the highest numbers of HIV sufferers, whether male, female, urban or rural, followed closely by Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Manipur and Goa.

Explaining this regional concentration of HIV cases, Rao said it was due to the high migration from these states to the urban metropolitan centres like Mumbai. Intensive research on the spreading tentacles of the disease showed migration of sex workers, truckers and migrant labour from the southern states to Maharashtra.

In Manipur, the high incidence of the disease was due to the large presence of intravenous drug users.

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West Bengal and Gujarat have been categorised as “moderate”, and the rest of the country figures in the low prevalence category.

Policy planners and health experts say the state-wise figureswould prove invaluable in planning programmes to not just arrest the trend (of spread of the disease) but also in building care and support systems.

State-wise estimates would also sensitise state administrations to identify problem areas and gear the administration for effective appropriate measures, said Rao.

India’s efforts for curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS also came in for close scrutiny at last month’s Monitoring AIDS Pandemic (MAP) meeting in Kuala Lumpur. The problem was also examined from a sub-continental perspective since a major cause of the spread of HIV/AIDS was trafficking in girls and children, primarily from Nepal and Bangladesh to urban centres like Mumbai and Calcutta where they are pushed into prostitution.

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At the Kuala Lumpur meet, the regional countries adopted a Regional Plan of Action to tackle HIV/AIDS and its causes.

A regional meeting of representatives from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bhutan is on the anvil, where they will share expertise on AIDSprevention and control and examine government-to-government efforts to end the growing traffic in women and children.