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| MEN & MATTERS | | A 'white man-only' disease? | |
B L KAK
Not an ordinary day at all. Friday was observed as World AIDS Day across the world, including India. In fact, India did attract a good deal of attention in view of the finding of the Geneva-based agency, UNAIDS--India has 5.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS, the highest figure in the world, ahead of South Africa where the figure stands at 5.5 million.
An interesting revelation in an official HIV-AIDS study in northern India: A frightening number of truckers believe that the disease can only afflict white people. Nagendra Singh, who headed the survey in India's most populous State of Utar Pradesh, said in a media interview: "The truck drivers feel AIDS is a foreign disease and they are safe... that the disease does not affect Indians, only white people". The study, released this week, was carried out over six months and involved interviews with 252 truckers, considered one of the highest risk groups due to their easy access to cheap sex in roadside brothels.
According to Nagendra Singh, 82 percent of them said that they have heard about AIDS and have read about it in hoardings along the highways, but they think it is a foreign disease. Singh conducted the study on behalf of the UP government's health department. And Singh has stated that the misperception might be because there was no catchy Hindi-language translation for AIDS.
The study also found 27 percent of truckers had various other sexually-transmitted diseases. Over half had a history of such diseases, while 40 percent admitted to having passed on the disease to their wives. State officials in Uttar Pradesh, of which Lucknow is the capital, fear some three-quarters of them may be infected with HIV. According to a nationwide study last year, the three million long-haul truckers plying India's 8,000-kilometer highway network are 10 times more likely to be infected with HIV than other population groups.
A new report published by the Independent Labour Organisation (Geneva) said on Friday that the HIV/AIDS had resulted in a million fewer jobs a year being created in the worst-hit countries, compared to what might have been in the absence of the epidemic. The lack of access to treatment would also see mortality losses to the global labour market triple from 28 million estimated for 2005 to 86 million projected for 2020. Improved access to antiretroviral drugs, ARVs, was urgently needed to prevent the forecast becoming reality.
According to the report, which studied 43 countries, an estimated 36.3 million people of working age were either infected or living with the virus worldwide. The death and illness of workers was "jeopardizing the ability of the worst affected countries to lift themselves out of poverty", said the report. It was costing them dear in terms of lost economic growth and employment opportunities. There were worrying implications for the future labour market too, with increasing numbers of children, whose parents had died or were sick from AIDS, being propelled into work too early, exposing them to risk and robbing them of education.
India may be leading the way in producing generic HIV-AIDS drugs, but the country is failing to make low-cost treatment available to its own estimated 5.7 million sufferers, activists and experts said ahead of World AIDS Day on Friday. India has the world's highest HIV-AIDS caseload, and provides anti-retroviral treatment to 55,000 people - or just seven percent of those who need the drugs, according to the UN's AIDS body.
In contrast Brazil, with 620,000 HIV-infected citizens, treats 83 percent of those who are ill enough to require the drugs, and cites its combination of prevention and treatment for halving death rates from HIV in the last 10 years. In India, the government programme, launched in 2004 with eight centres, now has 101 centres that treat about 40,000 patients, while 5,500 AIDS patients get the drugs from their public employers or through non-governmental organisations. Another 6,000 patients are receiving treatment privately.
"There is an essential test to be conducted before prescribing ART (anti-retroviral treatment). This test is not easily available", said Elango Ramachandran, head of the Indian Network for People Living With HIV/AIDS. "This is a constraint", said Ramachandran, whose 45,000-member network is protesting in Delhi ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1.
But a consultant to the ART programme run by the National Aids Control Organisation says India is increasing its efforts and expects to be treating 100,000 AIDS patients by the end of 2007. "There has been a sea-change in the programme over the last one or two years", said BB Riwari, who said the government added 600 testing and counseling centres in the last six months. According to Riwari, the government of India spent seven billion rupees (155 million dollars) last year on AIDS, more than on any other single disease.
But even so, the government says it is unable to afford to include a more expensive class of anti-retrovirals, the "second-line" drugs needed when the virus becomes resistant to the first-line drugs. If companies are barred from producing cheap second-line drugs after the first-line drugs have become useless, it could mark the end of the road for the low-cost AIDS drugs revolution.
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