While India has successfully managed to stem the HIV/AIDS crisis, women in the country and worldwide are fast becoming the most victimised by the disease. HIV/AIDS is getting more feminised, a study by UNAIDS has pointed out.
“27 million Indian women each year are pregnant and deliver in India, out of which about 1,20,000 (one hundred twenty thousand) women are thought to be HIV positive. And, 18 to 20 thousand infants end up being acquiring HIV,” Charles Gilks, country coordinator, UNAIDS said at the launch of the report on Friday.
Gilks lauded India’s progress in stemming the spread but had words of caution for the country as well.
“It is very difficult to identify women in India who are HIV positive. Many of these women are infected by their husbands. It is a worrying number and we need to do more,” he told Governance Now on the sidelines of the report launch.
This has also become an international trend as 51 percent of the affected persons globally were women, according to the report.
However, Gilks added that in the last decade, India has registered a 50 percent reduction in the number of new infections. “It is an outstanding contribution,” he noted.
The challenges of India have become more evident as it gained a middle-income country status with the recent GDP upsurge. The press note said, “With growing economic strides by India, it cannot so easily access international donations to help fund the domestic AIDS responses.”
This is more relevant because recently the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's India AIDS Initiative – Avahan slashed funding for AIDS programmes in the country.
“The handing back to government is very questionable. It is not very correct model. It is like nationalising the initiative. These are very high cost programme which Avahan was funding for the last eight years. With such high cost programme, government will find it difficult to sustain. Rather it should have worked with government and community,” says Prasad Rao, special advisor to UNAIDS.
“Many of the people who are in risk groups are young people in India,” said the report. Globally, according to the report, nearly 23 per cent of all people living with HIV are younger than 24 years and people belonging to 15-24 years accounted for 35 per cent of all people becoming newly infected. Gilks also called for increased domestic support to national AIDS control programmes and create a new form of mutual accountability.
Gilks also sopke of a silver lining. “India has achieved the sixth point of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which deals with the halt and reverse spread of HIV/AIDS. This is the most successful of the millennium development goals in India. But it was very modest goals.” The UN has set an ambitious goal of zero new HIV infections and zero AIDS-related deaths by 2015.
"In India alone, four lakh people are on Anti Retroviral Therapy. We need to achieve 15 million on treatment. If we do achieve by 2015 the epidemic of HIV/AIDS can be fully contained," he said.
The report noted that between 2001 and 2009, the rate of new HIV infections in 33 countries fell by at least 25 percent. However, the study also mentioned, “Every day 7,000 people are newly infected.”
“From 2005 to 2009, the number of children orphaned by AIDS increased from 1.46 crore to 1.66 crore," it said.
The UNAIDS report is based on data submitted by 182 countries which also mentioned that weak national infrastructures, financing shortfalls and discrimination against vulnerable populations are among the factors that continue to impede access to HIV prevention.
Peter Piot of London School of Hygiene and Tropical Nedicine, cautioned about the complacency factor in the fight against the disease. “It was too premature to cry victory. Thirty years of learning we should have been more effective," he noted.
The total estimated number of HIV/AIDS patients in India was 2.4 million in 2009, according to the latest figures from National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO).
