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The good news on the occasion of World AIDS Day
Good news on the occasion of World AIDS Day. Thanks to medical advancement, HIV\AIDS is no longer a death sentence. It is more a chronic disease, which allows persons to live with HIV for up to 25 years. Cheaper options of anti-retroviral drugs have indeed made HIV more manageable.Now, the bad news. Society’s biased attitude towards HIV\AIDS-positive persons has not changed. Social health workers contend that HIV\AIDS is met with the same apprehension and derision as it was two decades ago. The recent incident in which an HIV-positive widow in a Kolkata hospital had to “pull out’’ her foetus as the medical staff didn’t want to assist her with the abortion, is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mumbai is no better. A 34-year-old HIVpositive person had to put up with painful hernia for three months because two public hospitals refused to admit him. “Despite claims of non-discrimination, no doctor wants to operate on a HIV-positive person,’’ charges a social worker. It was only after much coercion that the patient got a bed in the civic-run Nair Hospital, Mumbai Central, last week.It is common to see patients with HIV\AIDS lying on floor beds and regularly abused by nurses and wardboys while attempting to wander in their antiviral druginduced stupor. Their susceptibility to skin infections (like ringworms) and diarrhoea worsens their isolation.
According to ‘Unveiling The Truth’, a global report of the online watchdog group Health and Development Networks, “Hospitals, clinics and other healthcare settings are among the places where people living with HIV still experience some of the worst HIV-related stigma.’’Suresh Shetty, minister of state for medical education, admitted that ‘discrimation’ does happen. At a public function on Thursday, he said, “it is a reality that in many places, doctors don’t treat HIV/AIDS persons’’ and promised to implement a non-discrimination policy “at least in medical colleges’’ to enable punitive action against errant doctors.
Savita’s experience underlines the irresponsibility in the public health system. Widowed two years back, the Colaba resident was cursorily told by GT Hospital staff that her husband had succumbed to complications from HIV\AIDS. “My family members and I were not even advised to undergo an HIV test,’’ recalls Savita (name changed). It is only when she started falling ill too frequently that she was brought to JJ Hospital and a positive diagnosis made It is not only the marginalised who suffer. Even patients in private hospitals suffer—although differently. Their “operations’’ are always costlier and taken up last on that particular day.
ON THE POSITIVE SIDE:
It is mandatory for diagnostic laboratories and hospitals to use disposable syringes and needles
The 1,000-odd Voluntary Counselling and Testing Centres or walk-in centres to encourage HIV testing will increase to 4,000 in the next couple of years,The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases are at an all-time low Neglected diseases such as TB are getting attention —and money— because of their AIDS-related resurgence There is thrust on research, especially for an HIV vaccine and microbicidal gels that will kill the virus The anti-retroviral therapy — drugs which slow down the descent into AIDS—have become cheap with each consecutive year More ART centres across the country.