Faulty AIDS Count to be set right

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HINDUSTAN TIMES, New Delhi, Tuesday July 19, 2005

Faulty AIDS count to be set right

SANCHITA Sharma

New Delhi, July 18

A combination of fewer infections but more AIDS deaths have kept India's

HIV/AIDS estimates lower in 2004 as compared to 2003. To correct the

oversight the National AIDS Control Organisation's (NACO) HIV/AIDS estimates

for 2005 will have a new component: estimates of the number of people who

have died of AIDS.

A high-level UNAIDS team is in India to help NACO set up a surveillance

system to give estimates of AIDS deaths as part of India's AIDS control

programme phase III. " India has a sound surveillance system to reach HIV

estimates, but there is no system in place to estimate AIDS deaths, " says

J.V.R. Prasada Rao, director, Asia-Pacific Regional Support Team, UNAIDS.

" NACO must come up with estimated death figures to get more exact annual

estimates. "

NACO had reported this year that the total number of people living with

HIV/AIDS in India had risen fractionally from 5.1 million in 2003 to 5.13

million in 2004 - the lowest ever rise in the new infections since HIV was

first reported in the country in 1986. There were only 28,000 added

infections in 2004, as compared to 520,000 new infections in 2003.

" Apart from fewer infections, one major reason for the small rise in numbers

last year could be because more people are dying of AIDS, which has matured

as an epidemic in India, " says Rao, who headed NACO for some years before

his current stint at UNAIDS. NACO is now in the process of designing the

National AIDS control programme phase III, which begins this year. Laggard

states - like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan - will get

special focus. " All health-control programmes in the past - be it polio,

population stabilisation or leprosy - have always been stuck in these

states, " says Rao.

Low HIV/AIDS prevalence at 0.91 per cent of the adult population in India

shows that NACO's intervention programmes - information, targeted control

and treatment and care programme - work, says Rao. " In a low-prevalence

situation, infection is still driven by three important segments: commercial

sex workers, injecting drug users and gay liaisons, " says Rio.

Killer Estimates:

Total Infections in 2004 = 5.13 Million

Residence Male Female Infected Population

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Urban 13.29 7.98 21.27

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Rural 18.03 12.04 30.07

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Urban 31.32 20.02 51.34

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All figures in Lakes