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| AIDS on rise, awareness, education lacking | | | Pankhuri Aggarwal
Jammu, Feb 28: AIDS, a deadly disease which is slowly acquiring the whole world, has recently hit the Jammu city. The state has a huge concentration of military and paramilitary forces that are high risk groups and are prone to infecting and being infected.
They live away from their families and may have sex with local men and women, including sex for money. Equally important, as people are injured in militancy, growing numbers of people need blood transfusion. HIV infection can be transmitted through unsafe blood transfusion. Jammu has registered five deaths due to HIV/AIDS in 2008 and at present there are more than 200 such cases in the state. Experts in the field believe that as surveillance has been increased, more and more people are willing to come forward and get themselves tested.
They say since social stigma is attached to AIDS, many people are not willing to come forward and cooperate with the authorities. It has been monitored and recorded that since 1991 more than thirty thousand men, women and children have been infected by AIDS, though authorities concerned are more worried because maximum people do not come up or get themselves tested against HIV. Even parents are reluctant to talk about this life absorbing disease amongst there children. When asked if he had figures on the numbers of people with HIV in the camps taking place in the state, Dr Vikram said, "Even if there are cases, they don't get reported due to lack of awareness and more over people need to be educated about the dangers of unprotected sex, unsafe blood transfusions and recycled syringes."
"Even the Hospitals in the state do not have proper facilities to test for HIV, he added. On asking a student Radhika Ganjoo, she said, "Due to lack of proper knowledge, people do not have clear picture in there minds regarding AIDS and because of which they are reluctant to talk about all the things concerned with it".
She further added, "Sexual abuse and auscultation amongst the women due to which we can observe rise in the HIV cases". When contacted the experts said, "We do accept that the number of such cases are on a rise and because of stigma they are not coming forward. Our annual survey shows that 0.01 per cent of population is affected by AIDS and even if we calculate that situation is worse, then the figures may go up to 0.06 per cent." They further added, "We are doing our best to lessen the number of HIV positive cases through massive campaigning by newspapers and awareness campaigns launched by the health officials".
Another student Pooja Gupta said, "We usually describe AIDS as a catastrophic health problem having socio-economic and ethical dimensions, people affected by such disease are not accepted easily and because of that they feel shy to talk to anyone or take proper guidance from the doctors and that causes a sense of belongingness among those people and they even feel unsafe."
The Jammu and Kashmir Aids Prevention and Control Society (JKSAPCS) has made a feeble attempt to educate people on HIV by roping in religious leaders like Muslim imams, Christian priests and Sikh granthis in the state to speak to their communities. "The initiative draws inspiration from Uganda and Indonesia, where such messages are being propagated through imams," says ND Wani, director of JKAPCS. He further added, "Our state is lucky enough in this regard that only one-third of the individuals are infected with AIDS in Jammu." He further added, "We are taking and will keep on taking various preventive measures to cut and control this disease from the state and will see to that this disease does not raise but show a down fall". |
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