** HIV is ‘out of control’ in India**
A senior Aids expert has warned that HIV in India is “out of control”.
The executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids said that the epidemic in India is spreading rapidly and nothing is being done to stop it.
Richard Feachem warned that India has overtaken South Africa as the country with the most HIV positive patients.
He warned that the epidemic has spread so quickly that India needed to “wake up” and take the problem seriously, otherwise millions of people will die.
Official statistics ‘wrong’
“The epidemic (in India) is growing very rapidly. It is out of control. There is nothing happening in India today that is big or serious enough to prevent it,” Mr Feachem said.
He warned that India has now overtaken South Africa as the country with the highest number of people living with Aids or the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.
Aids campaigners in India
Ignorance in India about HIV is a major worry
“Official statistics show India in second place and South Africa in first place,” he said, “but the official statistics are wrong. India is in first place,” he told the AFP news agency.
Latest figures provided by the UN agency UNAids - released in July 2004 - show that South Africa had the highest total of people with HIV or Aids in the world, with an estimated 5.3 million infected adults and children in a range of 4.5 to 6.2 million.
India’s total was put at 5.1 million, but the range estimate was far wider - from 2.5 to 8.5 million - because of the lack of reliable data there in relation to the HIV pandemic.
India has to wake up and India has to take this very, very seriously
Richard Fiche, Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids
Mr Feachem warned that the illness would spread faster among India’s Hindu population than among Muslims, because Muslims tend to be circumcised, which he said was “an acknowledged protective factor” against the Aids virus.
Widespread ignorance
The Global Health Fund was set up in 2001 by the G8 group of industrialised countries to provide funding for countries worst affected by HIV/Aids, Malaria and TB.
It provides funding for HIV prevention projects, but there are instances where the Fund will grant funding for treatment as well.
Mr Feachem said that the biggest form of transmission in India is from heterosexual intercourse with prostitutes.
HIV positive woman in India - (copyright - Unpaid)
India is home to one in seven HIV-positive people
He said the problems were compounded by widespread ignorance about HIV, an illness which he said had become stigmatised.
He also criticised the high prices in India of anti-HIV drugs.
“It is easier to get Indian generic drugs in Africa than it is to get them in India. That is a scandal and has to be changed.”
The Global Fund has committed more than three billion dollars to 300 programmes in 127 countries for combating HIV/Aids, TB and malaria.
