news details |
|
|
| Rising HIV cases in 100 districts | | HIV has infected 5.7 million Indians | |
NEW DELHI, NOV 20
Ashok Alexander, Director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's 258 million dollar Indian HIV-prevention project, has warned that India must get on top of its HIV epidemic by 2007 or risk seeing it spiral out of control. Ashok, who is also a senior official of the United Nations, said in an interview: "The signs are still ominous".
He said that the rising prevalence of HIV in more than 100 districts in which the foundation operates showed that a decade of government efforts had not slowed the virus, which is now estimated to have infected 5.7 million Indians. "The huge challenge is scaling up prevention efforts. 2007 is when we need to have done this by", added Ashok Alexander, who has repeatedly said that India's epidemic is at a tipping point. "It's very urgent."
Alexander, speaking at the foundation's New Delhi offices, said old-fashioned and inefficient management within the government's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) was the main obstacle to success. Denis Broun, India coordinator for the UN's HIV-prevention agency, UNAIDS, said that in the worst-case scenario, the virus could spread to infect 3 percent of India's billion-plus population in the next 5 to 10 years, up from 0.9 percent now.
The AIDS-causing virus is presently thought to be largely confined within a sexual triangle of poor, male migrant workers, the prostitutes they visit, and their wives back home. For that reason, the Gates Foundation spends much of its efforts telling the first two groups to use condoms.
Broun said that India must aim to get 80 percent of its prostitutes to insist on their clients using condoms if the number of new infections each year is to drop significantly below the estimated 400,000 annual deaths from AIDS in India. Safe sex messages from the government and NGOs are currently heard by about a quarter of Indian prostitutes, Broun said.
If India fails to convince many more of the importance of condoms, the country's repeatedly delayed efforts to get ever more people with AIDS on life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs are doomed to forever lag behind new infections.
Ashok Alexander, who worked at consultancy firm McKinsey & Co. for nearly two decades, praised India's recently finalised HIV strategy, which will see it spending 2.5 billion dollars over the next five years on prevention and treatment. But whether it will be carried out effectively is far from assured, he said. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
