AIDS infested India - deadly threat to Bangladesh

[DARIUS]

An advice which I would like to give to our Bangladeshi friends-India has already been able to eradicate a disease which is far more potentially harmful than AIDS and that's called Polio (I am saying this because AIDS is something that is easily preventable by following a few guidelines such as safe sex,Use of condom's,using disposable syringes. . .etc. unlike Polio which could spread from one person to another even through contamination caused by fecal matter!!).If India has been capable of achieving this than I am pretty sure that we would be able to put an end to the HIV endemic pretty soon as well cause well defined mechanisms for spreading awareness and educating amongst people are in place and they are functioning pretty effectively.Campaigning is the only way out since a major cause of this disease is ignorance on the part of those who get infected.Now the question remains that India is trying,finding out and correcting its fault's and shortcoming's and is emerging successful,but what about those countries where Polio vaccination have been declared as Haram by radicals??What about those countries which have a general perception that people belonging to a certain religion cannot have AIDS!! And also what about those countries where people are more concerned about endemics and epidemics in their neighboring country than their own Now here are some links-

According to a recent study in the British Medical Journal, India has an HIV/AIDS population of approximately 1.4-1.6 million people.While it was originally estimated that India might have had as many as 5.5 million people infected in 2005, more accurate estimates put the number at below 2.5 million in 2007. These new figures are supported by the World Health Organization and UNAIDS.According to the United Nations 2011 AIDS report, there has been a 50% decline in the number of new HIV infections in the last 10 years in India.

HIV/AIDS in India - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Despite being home to the world's third-largest population suffering from HIV/AIDS (with South Africa and Nigeria having more), the AIDS prevalence rate in India is lower than in many other countries. In 2007, India's AIDS prevalence rate stood at approximately 0.30%—the 89th highest in the world.[6] The spread of HIV in India is primarily restricted to the southern and north-eastern regions of the country and India has also been praised for its extensive anti-AIDS campaign.The US$2.5 billion National AIDS Control Plan III was set up by India in 2007 and received support from UNAIDS.The main factors which have contributed to India's large HIV-infected population are extensive labor migration(Bangaldeshis of course) and low literacy levels in certain rural areas resulting in lack of awareness and gender disparity.The Government of India has also raised concerns about the role of intravenous drug use and prostitution in spreading AIDS, especially in north-east India and certain urban pockets.A recent study published in the British medical journal "The Lancet" in (2006) reported an approximately 30% decline in HIV infections among young women aged 15 to 24 years attending prenatal clinics in selected southern states of India from 2000 to 2004 where the epidemic is thought to be concentrated. The authors cautiously attribute observed declines to increased condom use by men who visit commercial sex workers and cite several pieces of corroborating evidence. Some efforts have been made to tailor educational literature to those with low literacy levels, mainly through local libraries as this is the most readily accessible locus of information for interested parties.Increased awareness regarding the disease and citizen's related rights is in line with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.
The estimated adult HIV prevalence was 0.32% in 2008 and 0.31% in 2009. The states with high HIV prevalence rates include Manipur (1.40%), Andhra Pradesh (0.90%), Mizoram (0.81%), Nagaland (0.78%), Karnataka (0.63%) and Maharashtra (0.55%).
The adult HIV prevalence in India is declining from estimated level of 0.41% in 2000 through 0.36% in 2006 to 0.31% in 2009. Adult HIV prevalence at a national level has declined notably in many states, but variations still exist across the states. A decreasing trend is also evident in HIV prevalence among the young population of 15–24 years. The estimated number of new annual HIV infections has declined by more than 50% over the past decade.
According to Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of UNAIDS, India’s success comes from using an evidence-informed and human rights-based approach that is backed by sustained political leadership and civil society engagement. India must now strive to achieve universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support.

HIV/AIDS in India - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2012 UN Report


New HIV cases among adults have declined by half in India since 2000, according to a new UN report which praised India's contribution to AIDS response through manufacture of generic antiretroviral drugs.
Though rate of HIV transmission in Asia is slowing down, at least 1,000 new infections among adults continue to be reported in the continent every day in 2011.
An estimated 3,60,000 adults were newly infected with HIV in Asia in 2011, considerably fewer than 4,40,000 estimated for 2001, a new UNAIDS report has said.
"This reflects slowing HIV incidence in the larger epidemics, with seven countries accounting for more than 90 per cent of people (in Asia) living with HIV - China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam," the report 'Together We Will End AIDS' said.
The UNAIDS lauded India for doing "particularly well" in halving the number of adults newly infected between 2000 and 2009 and said some smaller countries in Asia like Afghanistan and Philippines are experiencing increases in the number of people acquiring HIV infection.
It said a total 17 lakh people had died across the world due to AIDS related illness. In India, the figure for such deaths stood at 1.7 lakh in 2009. The report says India has contributed enormously to the AIDS response.
"With 80 per cent of these drugs being generics purchased in India, several billion dollars have been saved over the past five years. The country is also committed to new forms of partnership with low-income countries through innovative support mechanisms and South?South cooperation," the UNAIDS report says.
It also points out that India already provides substantial support to neighbouring countries and other Asian countries - in 2011, it allocated USD 430 million to 68 projects in Bhutan across key socio-economic sectors, including health, education and capacity-building. In 2011 at Addis Ababa, the Government of India further committed to accelerating technology transfer between its pharmaceutical sector and African manufacturers.

 

[Zabaniyah]

You guys talk too much...

 

[turkish]

 

[Imran Khan]

ager kabhi kisi film actress jiski age 30 sal se kam ho ko AIDS ho jayee to main us se shadi ker loon ga

 

[Ammyy]

ager kabhi kisi film actress jiski age 30 sal se kam ho ko AIDS ho jayee to main us se shadi ker loon ga

ye to frustration ki bhi haad hai

 

[airuah]

let us get this straight.....
1)lets say a few Indian truck drivers who may enter Bangladesh if transit is provided have AIDS
2)now every one knows that AIDS spreads through SEXUAL INTERCOURSE
3)so unless some ***** from Bangladesh jacks these guys for cash(i.e without protection) the disease will not spread........or is the guy who wrote the article do not trust their women?

 

[Imran Khan]

ye to frustration ki bhi haad hai

main charity work kerna chahta hoon yaar dunya main koi to ho jo aids waloon se shadi ker le i wana be great man

 

[ajtr]

main charity work kerna chahta hoon yaar dunya main koi to ho jo aids waloon se shadi ker le i wana be great man

If your thoughts are genuine then i thank you otherwise ill remove it.

 

[Imran Khan]

If your thoughts are genuine then i thank you otherwise ill remove it.

ap mujh per shak kerti hain mam ? i am hell serious kash katreena ko aid ho jay yaar

 

[Maira La]

AIDS Out Of Control In India

AIDS is out of control in Africa, and everyone knows it. But by some estimates, the most AIDS-infected country is no longer in Africa.

It's in Asia, and the country is India.

But according to a CIA report, if the epidemic isn't contained soon, it could come back to haunt us -- weakening India's army, and damaging India's economy.

And it could even lead to a new epidemic of the virus back in the United States. Correspondent Bob Simon reports.

Nobody is more aware of what the scourge of AIDS could do than Colin Powell, as he told the UN more than a year after 9/11: "AIDS is more devastating than any terrorist attack, any conflict or any weapon of mass destruction. AIDS can destroy countries and destabilize entire regions."

One of those regions is Africa, where in some places, 1 in 4 soldiers is infected with HIV -- putting the very stability of the continent at stake.

The CIA says India could be next -- a nuclear power and a key ally in the war on terror in a part of the world where al Qaeda has a strong foothold.

That's one reason CIA director George Tenet has taken notice of the AIDS epidemic. "The national security dimension of the virus is plain," says Tenet. "It can diminish military preparedness and further weaken beleaguered states."

That hasn't happened yet in India, but it could if the epidemic spreads any further. Experts say India is close to the tipping point -- after that, the virus will have spread too far to be contained.

Right now, it's still India's prostitutes who have been hit the hardest. A local outreach doctor showed 60 Minutes around Bombay's red light district, where we found a madam who says she just lost two girls to the disease.

Most of the women were reluctant to talk about AIDS. The few that did, however, said condoms, the only thing between them and virtual-certain death, are simply bad for business.

AIDS was first detected in India among prostitutes more than a decade ago, by Dr. Suniti Solomon. But she says that, as in so many parts of the world, the virus has spread well beyond the red light districts.

"I used to see one patient, new patient every week in 1991, 1992," says Solomon. "Today, we see 10 to 11 new patients every day."

That's why Solomon set up one of the first AIDS hospitals in India, in the southern city of Madras. They take anyone who walks in. "We don't throw them out," she says.

Solomon says roughly about 20 percent of their patients are truckers, because drivers at truck stops often frequent prostitutes – and, as 60 Minutes found when we spoke with them, many have little understanding of how the HIV virus is spread.

In fact, some truckers think bathing after being with a prostitute will do the trick, and they then go on their way making deliveries across this huge country -- delivering, among other things, the HIV virus to other prostitutes, and often to their own wives.

One trucker said he knew of drivers who had gotten HIV, but said: "If a person gets HIV, he doesn't go to the hospital, because people will come to know about it. And his wife will come to know about it. His friends will make fun of him; they'll isolate him."

That's why 90 percent of Solomon's female patients are not prostitutes, but monogamous women who've contracted HIV from their husbands. These are women like Periasamy Kousalya, whose husband from an arranged marriage was a trucker. He had HIV before they got married.

But Solomon says, even if this patient did know, women in arranged marriages often have little say about protection.

"You just can't talk about like she said on sex and sexuality," says Kousalya. "Girls don't want to know about it. And it's like immoral to talk about these things."

It's the same thing 60 Minutes found throughout our trip to India: men and women with some understanding of the virus, but not enough to stop it from taking on epidemic proportions in a country of a billion people.

"We have to save the next generation. We need to educate, we need to give information," says Kousalya. "But that doesn't say that you can sacrifice this generation of people with HIV Just if it happens to be your brother or sister or wife, I don't think an Indian or anyone in the world would say, 'I'd sacrifice that person.'"
And they may not have to, in large part because of Dr. Yusuf Hamied, who runs an Indian pharmaceutical company called Cipla, which makes inexpensive knockoffs of expensive Western drugs that have extended the lives of so many HIV-infected Americans.

"AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease," says Hamied.

But can American companies accuse Hamied of making knockoff drugs for India? "If I'm a pirate, I'm a thief. If I'm a thief, I must have broken some law. What laws have I broken," asks Hamied.

In fact, he hasn't broken any laws, at least not in India, because the country's loose patent rules still allow pharmaceuticals to be copied.

That's brought the cost of treating someone with AIDS down from $12,000 a year to less than $300.
Money, of course, is key to the whole AIDS dilemma, which brings us to Bill Gates. The world's richest man recently donated $200 million specifically to combat AIDS in India.

"This is the largest initiative focused on a single country we've ever done," says Gates.

"India's very important. It's the world's largest democracy. It's doing a great job in its educational institutions and developing a lot of programmers. Microsoft, my day job, has benefited from a lot of very smart people from India."

So has the United States. Indians field customer service calls from Americans. It has one of the world's largest software industries. It's one of America's key trading partners, and the CIA report warns that "The rise of AIDS will have significant economic... implications."

"India's on the brink of success. And one of the only things that stands in the way of that, achieving the incredible potential that India has, is making sure that there's not a widespread AIDS epidemic," says Gates.

For now, Bill Gates' priority in India, he says, is to save the next generation by funding AIDS education and outreach programs: "India faces a catastrophe that would set the country back a generation."

But what about this generation?

"I don't know where the Gates money will go," says Hamied. "Will he buy my medicines, or not? I don't know. I think you should put that question to him."

"Well, the focus that we have in India at this stage is prevention. That's our expertise, what we're bringing a lot of energy and visibility to," says Gates.

He's avoiding the whole touchy generic issue by concentrating on prevention, not treatment, because, he says, even the $300 price of a year's supply of generic drugs would not be cost-effective in India -- where the yearly health budget is around $20 per person.

But that's a big mistake, according to Solomon, who says her patients would never have come into the clinic for education and condoms in the first place if she weren't offering Hamied's generic drugs.

"Just preventing it doesn't work. People need to be taken care of. Otherwise, why will people listen to you," says Solomon.
The issue of treatment is at the heart of the CIA's threat assessment. If patients don't take their AIDS medications every day, strains of the virus could evolve which are resistant to the drugs, and that could make the expensive triple-cocktail therapy that has saved so many lives in America obsolete.

Solomon says that's more likely in India than in poorer AIDS-ravaged countries in Africa where patients often die without any treatment at all. Many of her Indian patients have some money for drugs to treat the disease -- just not enough to treat it right.

"They take it when they have the money. And they stop it when they don't have it. And what is going to happen to the virus over a period of time," says Solomon. "The HIV virus become resistant, and then it spreads back to America and all the other countries."

In fact, the CIA report says resistant strains of the virus "have spread around the world," in part because the triple cocktail drug regimen is not only expensive, but complicated.

But Hamied has a solution: By ignoring the patents held by the different big pharmaceuticals that manufacture the three drugs in the cocktail, he and other generics-producers have created an all-in-one pill that's much easier, and cheaper, to take.

"The reason we can do it is because the three drugs in question belong to three different companies," says Hamied. "I am able to put it all together. They can't. So, when you called me a generic, we may be generic. But in some cases, we are more advanced than even the multinationals."

After resisting to acknowledge its growing AIDS problem for years, this past December, the Indian government announced it plans to provide widespread treatment to infected people throughout the country.

"Now is the time to be very worried about this, to draw people together, to get the right resources. We can hold this to a very low level. This catastrophe can be prevented," says Gates.

Despite the CIA's warning, the U.S. government has focused almost all of its AIDS programs so far on the parts of the world where the virus is already out of control -- Africa and the Caribbean.

It has offered comparatively little money - less than 1 percent of the entire AIDS expenditure - to address the epidemic in India.


Source


We must take immediate measures to control flow of illegals Indians to Bangladesh. I hope our government takes note of the danger AIDS from India poses to our people.

 

[Maira La]

What's the latest update on AIDS in India? Is it under control by now? I'm curious.

 

[Bhairava]

Dec 2007 report...desperate MM....

 

[Kyusuibu Honbu]

What's the latest update on AIDS in India? Is it under control by now? I'm curious.

Its in decline

 

[Maira La]

An interesting, educational report:

A Deadly Passage to India

Reports on the prevalence of AIDS in India. The large commercial sex trade; How the virus is spread through truck drivers; The hesitancy of the Indian culture to address sex; The creation of a grass-roots sex workers' collective to teach safe sex practices; The support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; The importance of safe-sex education.

Find the report here.

 

[Roybot]

Yes indeed, here's another one. Looks like Indian truck drivers have already started rooting Bangladeshis.

UNICEF UK Blog

Bangladesh is one of only seven countries where HIV and AIDS cases increased by over 25 per cent between 1999 and 2009. The county is experiencing an HIV and AIDS epidemic among injecting drug users, which is spreading to other population groups and putting children at risk.

Now grow up will you? There are other ways to score point, don't do it at the expense of diseased people.