India told to wake up to AIDS catastrophe

India has been warned by the director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a senior official of the UN that it is on the brink of an AIDS catastrophe.

The country has been advised it must get AIDS under control by 2007 or face dire health consequences.

Ashok Alexander, director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Indian HIV-prevention project, says HIV in India is spiraling out of control and the nation needed to wake up and address the ominous signs.

Despite a $258-million anti-AIDS funds operations covering over 100 districts and a decade of government effort, the virus has been spreading at an alarming rate, says Mr. Alexander, and the latest reports have put the total of HIV-infected Indians at an astonishing 5.7 million.

Alexander says the issue is an extremely urgent one and a huge challenge.

He believes a major impediment to the AIDS-control program, is old-fashioned and inefficient management within the government's National AIDS Control Organization (NACO).

The coordinator of the United Nation's India HIV-prevention agency, Denis Broun agrees and has suggested that the deadly virus that currently affects 0.9% of India's populations could infect up to 3% of the country's population within the next 5 to 10 years.

India has now overtaken South Africa as the country with the highest number of people living with AIDS.

Broun says widespread ignorance was a major reason for the increasing spread of the virus and he maintains that the lack of awareness among prostitutes and migrant workers, the main target group of the virus, had to be addressed.

The AIDS-causing virus is thought to be largely confined within a sexual triangle of poor, male migrant workers, the prostitutes they visit, and their wives back home, and for that reason, the Gates Foundation spends much of its efforts telling the first two groups to use condoms.

Broun said 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.

The same approach with sex workers in Mumbai has been very successful and Broun says the average Mumbai commercial sex worker is probably the most informed in the country when it comes to HIV.

Broun says India must aim to get 80 percent of its prostitutes to insist on the use of condoms to prevent further spread of the virus and wider coverage of safe sex messages and other AIDS-awareness programs need to ensured.

He says the continued spread of the virus will make any expansion of the treatment program unsustainable, both financially and technically.

India's AIDS apathy and ignorance has been a growing cause of concern amongst world health experts and a recent poll of Indian parliamentarians revealed a surprising lack of awareness of the disease, with two-thirds wrongly believing that one could be infected by just sharing clothes with an AIDS affected person.